San Francisco Hoteliers Changing The Face Of Nob Hill
<B>San Francisco Hoteliers Changing The Face Of Nob Hill</B>
By Judy Jacobs
Although much attention is being focused on San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood these days, Nob Hill remains the hotel address of choice for many business travelers--and that is not expected to change. In fact, all four hotels on Nob Hill have undergone major upgrades that will make them more competitive than ever before.
When cable car service began in 1878, making the Nob Hill area more accessible to downtown, several railroad barons built palatial mansions there. Because they were constructed from timber, all but one were destroyed by fires resulting from the earthquake of 1906. Only the brownstone Flood Mansion, now the Pacific-Union Club, remains. The ruins of the others became the sites of some of the city's finest hotels--the Fairmont, Mark Hopkins, Renaissance Stanford Court and the Huntington.
These hotels all have undergone renovations and upgrades that will help them maintain their competitiveness, as upscale properties, like the upcoming Four Seasons, come online.
"Nob Hill has come back. The renovations have made it the place to stay," said Jon Makhmaltchi, director of sales of the Huntington Hotel. "The entire neighborhood, including Grace Cathedral, Huntington Park and even some residences, is undergoing renovation."
The Mark Hopkins completed a $50 million renovation late last month that covered all 380 guest rooms, restored the lobby exposing the original 1926 marble flooring but giving it a more contemporary look, added 10 new one-bedroom suites and doubled its club floor rooms to 44. All guest rooms were upgraded technologically to allow three means of Internet access: a standard dataport, Ethernet high-speed access and an OCX graphical user interface on the TV. The improvements are expected to appeal to the hotel's main guests, frequent individual travelers.
"Seventy percent of our business is FITs, and of that 40 percent is corporate," said Linda Palermo, the hotel's director of sales. "Most group business is meetings and incentives."
Across the street from the Mark Hopkins, the 591-room Fairmont is in the process of completing an $80 million renovation, with the remaining tower guest rooms to be finished in December. The public spaces have been restored to appear as they were when architect Julia Morgan designed the hotel after the 1906 earthquake. In addition to upgrading the guest rooms and enlarging the bathrooms, the project added fax machines, dual line phones and modems in all guest rooms. During the first quarter of 2001, high-speed Internet access will be installed in all rooms. The ballroom and 19 meeting rooms have been refurbished and high-speed Internet access was added last summer.
The Venetian Room also has been converted into a private function space. "The Venetian Room is now more conducive to meetings because it used to be an entertainment room, with two tiered sections. Now it's 4,500 square feet of flat surface," said David Wiener, the hotel's director of sales and marketing.
The Fairmont's concentration on the corporate market will remain. "Seventy-five percent of our business is business travelers. That won't change. The profile of the traveler will change. We've always been a hotel for senior level business travelers, now there will be even more of them," Wiener said. "We're more expensive than we were in the past." Until the beginning of next year, the hotel's rates will be raised roughly 20 percent.
The Renaissance Stanford Court, the third largest Nob Hill hotel, completed a soft goods renovation two years ago and spent another $500,0000 on meeting facilities and $1.3 million to totally remake its presidential suite. "The market mix for the hotel is 60 percent FITs, mostly business travelers, with the rest groups, mostly meetings," said Joe Mellia, the hotel's director of sales. "The ideal size for meetings is 200 people, but we've gone as high as 250 or 300 attendees."
Meanwhile, the Huntington, a much smaller hotel with only 140 rooms, will open its new Nob Hill Spa in mid-December in a space that was previously a French restaurant but has remained vacant for eight years. The spa will have 10 treatment rooms, including three with fireplaces, a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi and a weight training room. The spa's "longevity of life" treatments will include green tea and champagne facials.
"For incentives and meetings, the spa will add another dimension," said the Huntington's Makhmaltchi. The hotel handles small meetings, mostly 10 to 30 attendees. "Our largest meeting room holds 40 people, and the largest block of rooms we'd allot would be about 50," he added. In addition to the spa, the hotel installed DSL lines in all the guest rooms in June.
Being a boutique hotel, the Huntington is in a slightly different market than the other Nob Hill properties. "We only compete with the Mark Hopkins and Fairmont on location," said Makhmaltchi. "We consider ourselves in the line of the Sherman House. Our true competitive set is the Ritz-Carlton and Mandarin Oriental.