Business Amenities Arrive On The Honolulu Hotel Scene
<B> Business Amenities Arrive On The Honolulu Hotel Scene</B>
By Judy Jacobs
With the drop in inbound travel from Asia and the opening of the new Hawaii Convention Center, Honolulu is beginning to focus on a type of traveler it didn't pay much attention to in the past but expects to see more of in the future: the corporate traveler.
Hotels here are planning to add the types of business facilities that these days are taken for granted in most major city hotels, but are noticeably absent in many of Honolulu's primary properties.
As part of the $20 million, five-year renovation of the Sheraton Waikiki for example, the hotel is adding a state-of-the-art boardroom with Internet access at each seat, teleconferencing capabilities and local area network connectivity. "The convention center has brought a new customer back to Hawaii. It's changed the face of Waikiki," said director of sales and marketing Michael Troy. "The perception of Waikiki has changed from strictly a leisure destination to a place where you can have fun, but do business at the same time. As the perception has changed, there's also been a change in demand for facilities. As people discover these facilities exist, Honolulu will become more and more a place in which to do business with Asia."
What Troy also is seeing, and a niche the boardroom will help serve, is smaller meetings attached to major conventions. "As bigger conventions are looking to come here, we should get some additional spin-off business. In the case of conferences like the American Dental Association, which is bringing more than 20,000 delegates to Honolulu this fall, we will get some of the smaller chapter meetings and suppliers who will meet before or after the main convention," he said.
Sheraton also is planning to put in a full-service business center by year-end. "Not only are corporate travelers who are doing business in Hawaii asking for this type of thing, but so are people on vacation who want to do some work in the evenings. They want to know where they can plug in their laptops," Troy said.
The Outrigger Prince Kuhio also added a business center this year. It renovated an area next to the front desk and added three computers, a fax machine, a photocopier and a postage scale. It also has a small office/conference room that can accommodate up to four people and is open 24 hours a day.
"Although only 15 to 20 percent of our business is corporate, we are now in a position to receive more business travelers," said general manager Dean Nakasone, noting that the property has spent $7 million to renovate its 625 guest-rooms and added a 24-hour fitness center.
With the addition of the Outrigger Royal Waikoloan and the Outrigger Wailea, Outrigger Hotels & Resorts is repositioning itself from being a company focused on the leisure market to one aggressively pursuing meetings and incentives. And the Prince Kuhio stands in a unique position to benefit from the company's new strategy. "An Outrigger hotel in Waikiki gives groups an opportunity to have a meeting at a quality hotel, at a reasonable rate," Nakasone said.
Where two or three years ago the property handled mostly 100- to 150-guestroom conferences, it now is seeing smaller groups, including "lots of 20- to 30-people corporate meetings and seminars," he said.
The Hyatt Regency Waikiki also is in the process of adding a business center, which is scheduled to open this summer.
"Because of the Asia economic situation, we now find the need to develop markets that weren't as strong before, like the corporate market," said Hyatt sales manager Rene Nakashima. "Our corporate FIT business is just 5 percent, but we'd like to see that grow. It's only been within the past year that I've gone out to local corporations to show them we can handle that market."
Like the Outrigger Prince Kuhio, the Hyatt Regency also is seeing an increase in corporate meetings.
"Because the economy is doing well, a lot of smaller companies are coming to Hawaii for conferences and incentives," said Ron Nomura, Hyatt Regency Waikiki's director of sales. "We've also seen a rise in high-tech meetings. Companies like Compaq and Intel and the Oracle Application Users Group have all been here. It's a good meeting place between East and West, and the cost is no different than trying to get to San Francisco, for example.