Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, whose CEO is Jim Carreker, former CEO of Burdine's, has made the biggest splash. Les Bentley, president of the Dallas-based chain's hotel group, sums up the changes: "A year ago we had one property. Now we have two in Tampa, two in Orlando, four in Miami." Pausing for a breath and to review his notes on the back of an envelope, Bentley quickly adds, "On Oct. 1, we should have the two Marriotts in Key West -- the Casa Marina and the Reach."
For Wyndham, buying a hotel involves more than new signs out front and new guest-room stationery. "We're putting $22 million into the former Doral (in Miami) and $40 million into the (former) Marriott I-Drive (in Orlando), which we'll manage but don't own. We'll take the Tampa West Shore down to the sheetrock, then put everything new in the rooms -- furniture, the soft goods (drapes, bed and bath linens), carpeting. We'll even grind down and polish the marble vanity tops, which are beautiful."
This will cost the company $300 million to $400 million. Fueling the expansion was a $1-billion infusion on June 30 from sale of preferred stock to a group of investors, after Wyndham merged with Patriot American Hospitality. According to Bentley, Florida is a natural location for Wyndham. "We feel there is more opportunity to expand north and south than east-west. Look at growth trends. Look at the Sunbelt -- California, Texas, Florida and Arizona. Plus, Florida is a stepping stone to South America."
Wyndham "is very aggressively trying to market to the leisure customer," but the company presently has a 75-25 mix of convention/business guests to leisure guests, which Bentley says is good. "Commercial guests' per capita spending is far larger than for the leisure guest, who's spending his money at Disney World."
Or at the recently expanded Universal Studios Escape, where the Loews chain on Sept. 10 opened the attraction's first hotel. The 750-room Portofino Bay Hotel is a reproduction of that Italian Riviera village, a favorite when the jet-set decides to travel by super-yacht. The hotel's rooms are spread through three-story buildings situated in a rough V-shape fronted by a pond. Except where the edges of the "V" were expanded to provide more rooms, the setting is painted to precisely match the individual but adjacent apartments in the actual village.
The theme is carried throughout the hotel, with one restaurant designed to resemble the traditional Italian matriarch's home, one of the pools surrounded by terraced walkways, even two bocci ball courts. There's also a dock area for boarding launches to the theme parks and Universal CityWalk, a series of themed restaurants and live-music venues.
Bryant T. Guillot, a Westin hotel chain veteran who opened the nearby Walt Disney Swan, is now Universal's vice president of resort sales and marketing. He's overseen creation of Portofino, as well as the 654-room Hard Rock Cafe and the 1,000-room Royal Pacific resort, set to open in December 2000 and in 2001, respectively. Also in planning is a pair of hotel towers that will have 2,600 rooms.
The emphasis at all three properties is clearly on the leisure guest: All recreational facilities, the eight restaurants and even the main entrance are on one side of the hotel, the meeting and banquet space on another. Cleverly designed hallways, artfully resembling narrow village streets, lead to the meeting and ballroom areas.
"The property should be 75% to 80% leisure guests," says Guillot. "We really are going after the upscale consumer and vacation traveler." Prices in off-season start at $235 a night, $335 in peak season.
While there are no discounts for theme park passes, hotel guests can enter the Universal parks up to an hour before other guests, can show their room key to move to the front of lines for rides the first hour after the parks open to the public and get first-available seating in restaurants.
Portofino offers butler service for 26 rooms, a separate pool and cocktail lounge for guests in the 250 pricier Villa suites, and speedy check-in for all: A staffer with a handheld computer greets arriving guests at their car, swipes their credit card and transfers their luggage to the room -- no stopping at the front desk. The hotel has 18 suites for families with kids -- two beds in a separate room adjoining the parents', with a single door to the suite.
The family suite idea proved so successful at a Holiday Inn in Orlando that a huge clone opened this summer: All 800 rooms in the Holiday Inn Family Suites Resort, in Lake Buena Vista, are suites. That includes 474 Kidsuites, 18 Sweetheart suites with heart-shaped bathtubs and 50-inch TV screens, and 12 Cinemasuites, each boasting a 60-inch TV and two rocking recliners.
Tom Waits, president of the Florida Hotel and Motel Association, sees the current hotel growth as "the result of planning once the industry overcame the tough years of the early '90s."