Hotel industry officials hope for salvation before others go under.

"Stay alive till '95," they're saying in parts of the Los Angeles County real estate community. That sentiment especially applies to the county's hotel industry, where new development has almost ground to a halt after the rapid build-up of room inventory in the 1980s.

Right now there are five hotels under construction in the county but probably four times that many are planned, and most of those have been in the planning stages for at least the past 18 months. The conventional wisdom is that one out of four of the planned hotels will actually start construction within the next 18 months or two years.

Nowhere else is the lack of new hotel construction more apparent than in downtown Los Angeles. The downtown hotel industry's problems have been well documented, from low occupancy to no big conventions to the recession and crime. And what makes matters worse is that no one expects a quick turnaround.

Most industry experts said they think, at the earliest, it will be mid-1993 before the downtown hotel business rebounds and new construction starts to pick up again.

By most industry counts, there are at least 10 hotels in various stages of planning for the greater downtown area. One is actually under construction, the Intercontinental, a 470-room property on Olive Street between GTK Way and Fourth Street that is scheduled to be completed in about 13 months.

If all the planned hotels are built, the inventory of rooms downtown would double to 12,000 but no one expects all the properties to be completed, especially since by general consensus, all the hotels in the area are having financial problems.

To a person, local hotel industry experts predicted that, at best, half the planned hotels will actually be built eventually and that none will be constructed, or completed, anytime soon.

One of the more pessimistic experts is Lou Myers, a real estate attorney who is a partner at a downtown law firm. He doesn't see any new major hotel construction in Los Angeles County, and particularly downtown L.A., for at least three years, and maybe longer.

"The hotel industry right now is under major pressure -- occupancy is down, room rates are down, travel is down, cash flow is down but supply is up. Existing hotels can't make their debt service so that certainly isn't a great incentive for new construction, to say nothing about the fact that lenders aren't lending money. There just isn't any money available for new commercial real estate," Myers said.

He contended the California economy has not yet hit the bottom of the current recession and it could be four years before the hotel industry in Los Angeles recovers from the slump it has been in for two years now.

Other experts are not quite so gloomy but all predict the slump at downtown hotels in particular is far from over, and they point to the recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by the Westin Bonaventure as a precursor of things to come. The 1,400-room Westin, with its cylinder and glass design, is a downtown landmark but is $75 million behind on its mortgage payments.

One upcoming event that may spark a turnaround in hotel construction downtown is the expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center, which is now scheduled to be completed in mid- to late 1993, two years behind its original completion date.

The expanded center, which will be more than twice as big and will include more modern amenities than the current facility, should attract major conventions to downtown Los Angeles -- something that has been lacking for several years.

In addition to the Intercontinental, hotels under construction in the Los Angeles area include properties in Glendale, the Los Angeles International Airport area, on La Cienega Boulevard near Beverly Hills and a hotel in Montrose. Completion of the hotels will not add significantly to the county's room inventory, which in August was 833,413, compared to 798,291 in August 1990.

Construction on another hotel, the Park Hyatt on the beach in Santa Monica, has ground to halt because the developer has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The property is also subject to litigation between the developer and the former lead contractor on the project.

Major new, or reopened, properties that have added to the room inventory since the first of the year include the Peninsula in Beverly Hills and the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. Both hotels are luxury properties and are reportedly having financial problems, according to industry experts. The hotels say occupancy hasn't met expectations but the properties are not threatened with foreclosure, bankruptcy or closing.

But industry experts predict that what happened at the Westin Bonaventure will probably be repeated at other properties before the industry comes out of its slump.

"A lot of hotels are over-leveraged and over-capitalized and may be taken over by their lenders and sold off," said Bruce Baltin, an industry analyst and partner in the Los Angeles office of Pannell Kerr Forster, an accounting and consulting firm. "I expect that there will be others like the Bonaventure. There will be more foreclosures."