Hotel Online
News for the Hospitality Executive


 
Boom in Small Hotels Seen as Benefit
to Boston's New Convention Center
By Thomas C. Palmer Jr., The Boston Globe
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News 

Mar. 18--With "Cheers" in reruns, the next ambitious young team of TV sitcom writers may want to set their characters in a fashionable boutique hotel in Boston. 

In the Back Bay. Or Charlestown. Or Kenmore Square. 

Trendy, one-of-a-kind hotels are going up in all those neighborhoods. Along with some larger inns that are in the ground or have won city approval, they defy almost a year of economic stagnation and an otherwise moribund commercial real estate market. 

Although public attention often focuses on the big ones Boston hasn't landed yet, like the delayed 1,200-room Starwood Sheraton that will serve the new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston, hotels in the 30- to 200-room range are springing up. They won't accommodate 40,000 dentists or the Democratic National Convention crowd, but city and industry officials say that collectively they will go a long way toward solving a longstanding shortage of places to stay in the city. 

"The hotels that are under development -- they fit the scale of Boston and what Boston is," said Patrick B. Moscaritolo, president of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. "Some of these boutique hotels, like Nine Zero, we could actually package and promote to convention attendees." 

Moscaritolo was talking about construction at 90 Tremont St., a 190-room inn being built by Intercontinental Developers. Also underway is the 149-room Commonwealth Hotel at Kenmore Square, the work of Great Bays Holdings and developer Frank Keefe and partners. Then there's the Embassy Suites, with 272 rooms, being built by Congress Group Ventures at Porter and Geneva streets in East Boston. 

Those three will all open this year, the two smaller ones in the summer. 

"We opened three hotels last year, three are in construction and will be finished this year, and we'll finish three next year," said Boston Redevelopment Authority director Mark Maloney. 

The state law that created Boston's convention center required Boston and Cambridge together to add 2,800 hotel rooms by about 2000. 

"We did 3,200," Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said in a recent speech. According to Susan Hannon, the BRA's deputy director of economic development, 3,250 hotel rooms have been added in the two cities since mid-1997, 1,130 more are now under construction, and an additional 4,430 have city permits and are only waiting for lenders to loosen up. 

The BRA forecasts that 6,380 rooms that didn't exist in 1996 will be available for guests by late 2004, when the convention center opens. If all of the projects now in the planning stage are thrown in -- such as the 600-room Grand Hyatt planned for Fan Pier -- city officials count more than 11,000 new rooms in the next decade. 

Three hotels opened last year: the 92-room Best Western Roundhouse Suites at 891 Massachusetts Ave. in Lower Roxbury, the 33-room Charlesmark Hotel at 657 Boylston St., and the 192-room Ritz Carlton on the Boston Common on Lower Washington Street. 

In Cambridge, both the 114-room Hampton Inn at 187 O'Brien Highway and the Kimpton Cambridgeside Hotel, with 236 rooms, are under construction and scheduled to open by the middle of next year. 

A little further into the future: 

The 168-room Homewood Suites, on Tudor Wharf in Charlestown, is under construction and has an end-of-2003 opening date. 

Work hasn't started yet on the old Boston Police Department headquarters building at 142 Berkeley St., but a 220-room reconstruction is planned, with a tentative opening of late next year. 

And another reconstruction is to begin in the Ames Building, 1 Court St., where Intercontinental Developers are putting in 162 rooms. Opening is set for summer 2003. 

If Boston and Cambridge together add 11,000 hotel rooms, Moscaritolo said, that will represent more than three-quarters of the quantity that the two cities had in total in 1996. Today, Boston counts about 13,900 hotel rooms, Cambridge another 2,300. 

More hotel rooms make Moscaritolo's job easier, because the bureau is responsible for booking conventions in the city. He said there are conventions booked for Boston in 2006-09, but none firmly in hand for late 2004 and 2005. 

Moscaritolo said the Menino administration has worked with developers on permits and helped them line up financing. 

"These projects don't happen by accident," he said. "It's a real credit to city government and the BRA how creative and aggressive they have been in moving forward on hotel development." 

But what even the most boosterish Boston officials acknowledge is that a "battleship" hotel or two will be required for the long-term success of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. 

"There are still groups that will come to the BCEC without a big-box hotel, but there are groups that will not," said Matt Arrants of the Pinnacle Advisory Group, which specializes in hospitality consulting. 

Raymond G. Torto, managing director of Torto Wheaton Research, said that aside even from the number of rooms, it's easier for convention planners to deal with big hotels than smaller ones. "You're choosing between Boston and Dallas," Torto said. "You say, 'Well, it's a lot easier to call a guy in Dallas than 10 guys in Boston." 

Although some have charged the Pritzker family with dragging their feet on the hotel planned for their Fan Pier parcel, Dan O'Connell, a principal at the project's development management firm, Spaulding & Slye Colliers, said this week that it is moving forward as fast as possible. 

"We are anxious to complete the public permitting process so we can move on to the next phase, which is marketing and financing," said O'Connell. "We expected that it would be a lengthy permitting process. We did not on day one expect it would be quite this lengthy." 

-----To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.boston.com/globe 

(c) 2002, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. HOT, 


advertisement

To search Hotel Online data base of News and Trends Go to Hotel.OnlineSearch
Home | Welcome| Hospitality News | Classifieds| Catalogs& Pricing |
Viewpoint Forum | Ideas&Trends | Press Releases
Please contact Hotel.Onlinewith your comments and suggestions.