Liam Denning, Columnist

Cheap Hotel Rooms in Texas Are a Bad Sign for Frackers

Downed tools and layoffs seem to be headed for the shale patch.

September 26, 2019 at 1:51 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

The site of a new hotel for workers in the oil industry in Odessa, Texas on February 4, 2015.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

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How bad are things in the Permian basin? You can actually book a hotel room in Midland, Texas, at a reasonable price.

A finance source I speak with contacted me this week with the news they were paying $250 a night for their room at a decent hotel chain there. This isn’t the usual sort of thing they text me about, I assure you. The reason they wrote was that a similar room had cost them about $800 six months ago – Ritz prices in a town with no Ritz.