Dolce Hotels and Resorts this month gained a significant boost to its portfolio as it took over management of the Midwest's largest conference hotel in terms of total square footage.
The 1,042-room Q Center in St. Charles, Ill., a former training campus for bygone accounting firm Arthur Andersen, joined Dolce's portfolio of 26 properties and more than 5,000 rooms in early September. The property, which has 150,000 square feet of event space, is Dolce's first hotel in the Chicago area and its ninth conference center.
Dolce now plans to leverage its relationships with corporate and event clients to push more business into the center, Dolce president and CEO Steven Rudnitsky said.
"The selection of Dolce to manage the Q Center is really part of an ongoing realization by owner-operated, dedicated conference hotels that they could have much more of a sustainable business model by diversifying their customer base to include outside and corporate clients," Rudnitsky said. "The primary object was because of our deep understanding and strong global client reach within the industry and the ability to drive much more outside business to the Q Center."
Dolce also will be applying its brand standards—its food and beverage programs, for example—to the Q Center, he added.
Overall group business at Dolce properties this year has increased in North America from 2013 levels, Rudnitsky said. Both requests for proposals and the actual number of events are up, although the company also is seeing a slightly smaller number of attendees at those events, he said. In Europe, group business indicates that it is "still well behind the group recovery in North America, but we're starting to see shades of it," according to Rudnitsky.