Such a deal. Stay in some of L.A.’s fanciest hotels and get two nights for the price of one.

Well, that may be too good to be true.

A two-for-one promotion being advertised by local tourism officials to fill the large number of vacant rooms at local hotels isn’t exactly what it seems.

If a hotel wants to offer one free night for every paid night’s stay, it can. But few are expected to do so because it won’t cover costs. In most cases, hotels will offer no more than one free night with every stay.

With the local hotel industry in one of its worst economic slumps in a decade and more than 4,000 hotel workers out of jobs, the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau quickly cobbled together a $1.8 million promotional package to encourage travelers to stay at local hotels at bargain rates.

The program, which runs from Nov. 13 to the end of next February, will be advertised in newspapers and on radio stations around California and in Phoenix to capture the drive market visitors who don’t want to fly to Hawaii for a vacation but are searching for a getaway spot reachable by car.

Typically a hotel needs to operate at 60 to 65 percent occupancy to make a profit. One night paid for and another night free only results in 50 percent of the rooms occupied assuming all the rooms are reserved with discount packages at any given time.

And operating at 50 percent capacity won’t cover a hotel’s fixed costs such as front desk staff, administration, security, engineering, housekeeping, debt service, insurance, taxes and maintenance.

“This type of package will probably represent a small total of occupancy in the hotel,” said Wayne Williams, president of Williams & Associates, a hotel asset management firm. “Anytime a hotel sees it is going to be near occupancy, it could shut off the deal.”

But with downtown L.A.’s hotels experiencing a miserable 38 percent occupancy rate in September, the convention and visitor’s bureau wanted to do something.

“This is all about economic development,” said Robert Barrett, vice president of marketing at the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau. “We’re trying to hang on to the 40,000 jobs we think we are hemorrhaging.”

Participating in the package deal may be more of a boon to the upper-echelon hotels because their clientele is more likely to call up room service, dip into the mini bar or get a massage at the hotel spa.

One hotel ready to participate is the Wilshire Grand Hotel & Centre, with 900 rooms in downtown Los Angeles that cater largely to international travelers or businesspeople who aren’t traveling now. “As slow as it has been, we have plenty of rooms, seven days a week,” said John Stoddard, the Wilshire Grand’s general manager.