Major Hotel Chains Bring Unique Boutiques To Portland
<B>Major Hotel Chains Bring Unique Boutiques To Portland</B>
By Judy Jacobs
Three new boutique hotels have added more than 600 rooms to Portland's inventory, offering more options for business travelers, making the Oregon city's hotel rates more competitive and leaving hoteliers with underfed occupancies.
"The market will be soft through 2001," said Dave Murray, general manager of the new Portland Marriott City Center on Broadway. "The demand has grown about 10 percent per year, while the supply has risen 18 percent. It will take a while to absorb the new supply."
Wolfgang Rood, president of Wolfgang Rood Hospitality Consulting, agreed: "There are a lot of hotel rooms, and it will take a few years before occupancies recover to what they were a few years back," he said.
Portland hotel occupancy has seen a gradual decline from 76.6 percent in 1995 to 70.4 percent last year. To the benefit of business travelers, however, average room rates also are on the decline, decreasing from $113.38 in 1998 to $110.72 last year. The lower rates and occupancies have been partly the result of the three new hotels that came on line last year.
In August, Marriott opened its second central Portland hotel, the Portland Marriott City Center in the heart of downtown. The hotel's target market is business travelers who are looking for something unique but want to stay with a major hotel brand. "We're different than a prototype Marriott. They typically don't have 249-room hotels in downtown areas. They also have hotels with lots of meeting space. We have fairly limited meeting space," said Murray. "This is Marriott's attempt to create the same niche as a boutique hotel for business travelers." The tactic seems to be working, since 70 percent to 75 percent of the hotel's business is corporate.
The Portland Marriott City Center, however, does cater to corporate meetings. "The ballroom capacity is up to 100 people for banquets. Twenty to 70 attendees is the ideal size for meetings," Murray said. One trend he has noticed is a lot of last minute meetings, with as little as one-week lead times. And in the meetings market, the two Marriotts--the second is the Portland Marriott Downtown--complement each other. "We refer big meetings to the other Marriott. They refer small meetings to us," Murray added.
Like the Marriott, the 205-room Westin Portland, which opened about the same time, provides an example of a new twist on a chain property. "This is a unique Westin product, a Westin hotel that is a boutique property," said Aaron Babbie, the hotel's director of sales. "Westins are usually large convention and resort hotels, but Portland is a boutique-focused market. That's what travelers have come to expect in this city. This is the first boutique-type hotel that Westin has operated, and it's a hybrid between a Westin and a W. It's a concept that is being considered for Westins in other cities."
Although the hotel has 10 Westin guest office rooms, every room in the hotel was designed with the business traveler in mind. "We've had 50 percent corporate so far, but we expect to increase that to 75 or 80 percent and plan to add more corporate meetings," Babbie said.
He emphasized the appeal of the desks in the guest rooms. Each of these desks has an ergonomically adjustable leather work chair and high-speed Internet access, which will be available in April. Guests will pay a daily fee of approximately $10 to use the high-speed Internet connection.
Meanwhile, the newest Portland property, the 154-room Paramount Hotel, opened Jan. 5 and, like the Marriott and Westin, is luring the corporate market with a boutique hotel product. "This is the no-nonsense business travel hotel. It's an upscale, full-service hotel that is going after the majority of business travelers, the midrange," said Matt Owen, the Paramount's director of sales.
The rooms in the Paramount have two-line phones with dataports and voicemail. "We're not a major group hotel, but we do have two 700-sq.-ft. meeting rooms along with full meeting services. The ideal meeting for us is a corporate meeting of 30 to 40 people," he added.
Although the hotel is in the midmarket price range, it is competing with properties at both ends of the scale. "We compete with the limited service, more budget hotels," Owen said, "as well as the best that Portland has to offer because of our location. We're right downtown. The corporate high-rise area is a block away and we're between the retail, cultural and corporate areas.