Oakland Stepping Into The Business Travel Limelight
<B>Oakland Stepping Into The Business Travel Limelight</B>
After years of being overlooked as it sat in the shadow of San Francisco across the bay, Oakland is finally coming into its own. Under the leadership of Mayor Jerry Brown, and thanks to outrageous commercial real estate rates elsewhere in the Bay Area, the city is rapidly becoming a business center and meetings destination.
Many factors are involved: Sixty development projects are underway. Favorable business conditions have convinced such companies as Ask Jeeves, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter On-Line, DoubleTwist and Zhone Technologies to relocate to the city in recent months. Mayor Brown has a plan to draw 10,000 more residents to downtown Oakland. These and other developments are all leading to Oakland's resurgence.
"People in this city are thinking big, so you're seeing a lot of business activity you didn't see before," said Manette Belliveau, executive director of the Oakland Convention and Visitor's Bureau, which has begun a "Destination Oakland" campaign to alert meeting planners and others of the city's vitality and potential. It also has put together a new Web site (www.oaklandcvb.com) that will be launched later this month and has a meeting planner component with descriptions of properties and facilities and the capability to gather leads.
Meanwhile, in moves that mirror Oakland's business expansion, hotel developers are busy planning new properties. Some 800 hotel rooms were added last year, mostly near Oakland International Airport, and 2,000 more have been approved citywide. The rooms are desperately needed, according to tourism officials. "Oakland is the seventh largest city in California, and it only has 3,000 hotel rooms. San Francisco has 30,000 rooms," Belliveau said. "We need hotel rooms more than anything else. As they come online, they're filling up very quickly. We get calls every day from planners looking for space who we can't accommodate."
Most notable of the new buildings are two downtown properties: a 220-room Hilton Garden Inn and a 160-room Courtyard by Marriott. The Hilton Garden is scheduled to open in September 2002 in the historic Key System Building, which dates to 1911 and once housed the headquarters of Oakland's former streetcar system. The Courtyard by Marriott is a new construction on the corner of Ninth and Broadway at the edge of Oakland's busy Chinatown. It is expected to begin receiving guests in January 2002.
In addition, at least two downtown properties are expanding, both at Jack London Square, the city's waterfront restaurant and entertainment district that borders downtown. The 144-room Waterfront Plaza is adding 63 rooms and 3,000 additional square feet of meeting space, bringing its total to 10,000 square feet. Not far away, the 147-room Executive Inn is adding 80 rooms and suites in a project to be completed next spring. Two other new hotels have been proposed for Jack London Square.
Meanwhile, the tiny neighboring town of Emeryville, which has become a burgeoning center for high-tech companies in recent years, has more than doubled its hotel count with two new hotels. The 212-suite Woodfin Suites opened last year across the tracks from the Emeryville Amtrak railway station and adjacent to the Emeryville Public Market restaurant and entertainment complex. The second new Emeryville hotel, the 295-room Courtyard by Marriott, opened in December. The hotel has 4,000 square feet of meeting space and Freda Ossi, the hotel's director of sales, expects about 33 percent of the hotel's business to be meetings.
Although Emeryville now has nearly 1,000 hotel rooms, Ossi is convinced that they will be easily absorbed. "Demand is very high," she said. "A lot of companies are moving to Emeryville and Oakland from San Francisco because San Francisco is just too expensive," she said. "Emeryville is not overbuilt. In fact, there are plans for another hotel across the street.