The hotel business has collided head-on with the bad economy and the tight credit market. Hotel revenue is down sharply. Big new projects, planned in the boom days, are either sitting unfinished or left on the drawing boards. And some high-end hotel owners now face an unhappy situation — how much can they cut prices to fill their rooms before they damage their hotels’ luxury cachet? “I don’t think anybody realized the switch was going to be turned off so quickly,” said Lisa Grossberg, the general manager of the Buckingham Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “We saw people being more rate-conscious; we saw the renegotiations of corporate contracts as companies tightened their belts in the fall. But then in the middle of December, everything just about stopped.”

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