Feb. 12--MENOMONEE FALLS, Wis.--A $20 million hotel and conference center that will cater to business executives is being built near Woodland Prime Office Park, developers said Monday. 

Construction of the 150-room DoubleTree Hotel & Conference Center will begin this spring, with a planned opening in summer 2003, according to Southern Wisconsin Development LLC. 

The hotel will be built at the southeast corner of W. Good Hope Road and Highland Drive, a short distance from the Woodland Prime Office Park. Woodland Prime recently announced an expansion that could include a $30 million office building with as much as 280,000 square feet. 

The development will be the first DoubleTree hotel in Wisconsin, and will have more than 10,000 square feet of meeting space with four board rooms, a full-service restaurant, bar and lounge, said Tom Kelly, a managing member of Southern Wisconsin Development LLC. 

Kelly said he and his partners decided to build in Menomonee Falls after researching the area's business climate for more than a year. They have built other hotels, including a Hilton Garden Inn in Green Bay and a Comfort Inn Suites in Portage. 

"You never want to be the first pioneer to build a hotel in any area," he said. "But we felt the Menomonee Falls area was ready for this, and there will be a lot of support for the hotel by the time it opens in 2003." 

The hotel will have a shuttle service to Woodland Prime Office Park, Park Place and other nearby business parks. In addition to meeting and banquet rooms, it will have a business center with personal computers and fax machines. 

Individual rooms will have high-speed Internet access, two telephone lines, voice mail and a cordless telephone. Suites and executive-level rooms will have more amenities. 

"We found there was significant interest in a full-service, upscale hotel," Kelly said. 

DoubleTree is part of Hilton Hotels Corp. The DoubleTree chain has been popular in the West and recently positioned itself to cater more to business travelers, said Gregory Hanis, a hotel industry analyst and president of Hospitality Marketers International in Pewaukee. 

The Menomonee Falls site makes sense, Hanis said, given the business park expansions and it's proximity to major highways. 

"There hasn't been a lot of hotel development in the northwest suburbs in recent years, particularly of the DoubleTree caliber," he said. 

The DoubleTree brand is well recognized among business travelers, especially in urban areas, Hanis said. Outside of the Madison and Milwaukee areas, he added, there probably would not be many cities in Wisconsin where DoubleTree would locate hotels. 

Menomonee Falls officials have wanted a full-service business hotel for at least several years, Village President Joe Greco said. 

The hotel is expected to create about 80 jobs. To be built on 10 acres, it will have room for a 150-room expansion that could take place in about three years, Kelly said. 

Besides business travelers, the DoubleTree in Menomonee Falls will cater to leisure travelers through amenities such as an indoor pool, game room, fitness center and a North Woods ambience, Kelly said. 

Room prices will be comparable to a Hilton or other full-service hotel in similar markets, he said. 

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(c) 2002, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. HLT,