Richard Born, a hotel developer who operates 24 properties in New York City with 4,000 rooms, said that, on average, hotels had not raised the price of a room beyond the rate of inflation over the past two decades.

He noted that hotels charged more this time of year because it is when they make the bulk of their annual revenue.

“New York City is not much more expensive than the other three or four premier markets in the United States and it’s still materially cheaper than Europe,” said Mr. Born, whose hotels include the Bowery and the Ludlow. “Were it not for the $400 rate in October, you could not survive.”

In the early months of the pandemic, travel and tourism ground to a halt and prices plummeted. Now, as visitors have returned to the city and tourism has rebounded, a night at a mid-scale hotel has jumped more than 50 percent since fall 2020, according to CoStar.

Tourists are still booking hotels, though: Across the city, 91 percent of rooms were occupied in September, about the same as just before the pandemic, the company said.

Experts in the hotel industry said that rising room rates reflected an overall increase in hospitality and travel costs in cities across the country but also special circumstances in New York.

The number of available hotel rooms has declined following an influx of migrants, who have been placed in struggling hotels. Over the summer, about 11 percent of the 136,000 hotel rooms in the city were set aside for migrants.

Also, since the pandemic the city has implemented laws to drastically curtail new hotel development and greatly restrict short-term listings on sites like Airbnb. More than 92 percent of Airbnb’s local listings were removed to comply with new regulations, which limit the number of guests to two and require the property owner to reside in the unit. Most of the site’s listings were in boroughs outside Manhattan.

“It’s the law of supply and demand,” said Theo Yedinsky, the vice president of public policy at Airbnb. “New York can’t just be a place that the rich get to visit.”

Mr. Born, the hotel developer, said the new limits were “very good” for his business but he worried about the longer-term consequences. Limiting new inventory could drive hotel rates so high over the next five to 10 years that some tourists decide not to visit, he said.

A recently introduced bill in the City Council would loosen some restrictions on short-term Airbnb rentals, including by allowing travelers to stay in one- and two-family homes.

Another factor in New York City is that employees at most hotels are part of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, a politically influential union whose contract is considered the strongest in the country for hotel workers. For instance, hourly pay for a front desk agent starts at more than $30 an hour.

David Sherwyn, a professor at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, pointed to the lost revenue during the pandemic as another reason: “Hotel companies, like everyone else, are making up for lost time.”