Jun. 25--Upgrading to meet the demands of corporate travelers, the Holiday Inn Select in Riverside is doing more than putting on a lighter coat of paint, adding meeting and banquet rooms and sprucing up its swimming pool and landscaping. 

The Holiday Inn Select in downtown Riverside will become a Marriott this fall following a $5 million renovation. 

The 292-room hotel adjacent to the Riverside Convention Center is upgrading to meet the demands of corporate travelers, hotel officials said. 

"We consider the Marriott to be the number-one hotel brand, and this increases the value of the services we can offer to our customers and it increases the value of our portfolio (of hotels)," said Mikii Cummins, director of brand marketing for San Clemente-based Sunstone Hotel Investors. 

The Riverside hotel is among 60 hotels in the Sunstone chain, most of which are located west of the Rockies. 

"The change from Holiday Inn Select to Marriott is strictly a change in our franchise affiliations for this property and does not involve the sale of the hotel or a change in the hotel's leadership," said Sunstone chief executive Robert Alter. 

Cummins said the hotel is being refurbished and its meeting and banquet rooms expanded from 10,000 square feet to 14,000 square feet to accommodate corporate travelers and the growing corporate meeting needs of the Inland Empire, which she said is one of the most popular areas in the state for business relocation. 

Holiday Inn Select General Manager Robert Smit said, as part of a Marriott requirement, the hotel will designate a 24-room "executive floor" that will have its own lounge for breakfast and afternoon cocktails. 

In addition, the hotel management said the new Marriott will have a concierge service, a restaurant offering Italian cuisine, an espresso bar and a lobby lounge featuring "the widest selection of martinis in the Inland Empire." 

Ted Weggeland, president of Entrepreneurial Hospitality Corp., which operates the Riverside Convention Center and the Riverside Convention and Visitors Bureau, said a Marriott hotel tends to attract more association and corporate customers than a Holiday Inn and business travelers who have more money to spend at downtown restaurants and stores. 

Weggeland also said the added meeting space at the hotel will help to compensate for limited space at the adjacent Convention Center, allowing conventions to spread their functions between the center, the new Marriott and the nearby 

HistoricMission Inn. 

"We think it is a very positive development for the Convention Center and for the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and for downtown Riverside," Weggeland said. 

In the transition, Cummins said the Holiday Inn Select's current management and 165 employees will be retained. But she said the hotel probably will add staff for the expanded banquet and food service departments. 

Holiday Inn Select General Manager Robert Smit said as part of a Marriott requirement, the hotel will designate a 24-room "executive floor" that will have its own lounge for breakfast and afternoon cocktails. In addition, the hotel management said the new Marriott will have a concierge service, a restaurant offering Italian cuisine, an espresso bar, and a lobby lounge featuring "the widest selection of martinis in the Inland Empire." 

It is the second brand upgrade for the Riverside hotel, which in January of 1999 was elevated from a regular Holiday Inn to a Holiday Inn Select under its previous owner, Lodgian Hotels. Sunstone Hotels bought the property in August of 2000. 

Smit said Sunstone reached a franchise affiliation agreement with the Washington D.C.-based Marriott about a month ago. Since then, the hotel lobby has featured golden- framed posters with samples of some of the posh Marriott approved appointments -- ranging from upholstery to tiles and carpeting -- that will grace the renovated lobby, restaurant and lounge. 

Smit said the "color boards" give the hotel guests a glimpse of what is "soon to come." It requires imagination, since the ceiling above the lobby is now missing, exposing a spaghetti cluster of utility wires and construction lights. The lobby floor is a crazy patchwork of green Astroturf, astro turf and multi-colored carpet and a banquet table does duty as the lobby desk. 

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(c) 2002, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. SXC, MAR,