Despite having led multiple tours of the new Hampton Inn & Suites Providence Downtown in just a few days, Jeffrey T. Karam still stopped with a visitor recently to revel in the panoramic views from The Capital Room, a function room on the hotel’s top floor. And for good reason – the 1,200-square-foot room has what’s likely the best view in the building – overlooking not only the Financial District, but also the East Side, The Providence River and Narragansett Bay.
It’s a view that Karam, vice president of development company First Bristol Corporation, hopes will attract functions such as wedding receptions and gatherings after parties. Along with leather couches and tables and chairs, it also has a flat-panel television and a kitchen, ready for a private caterer to set up for the day.
“Originally when we looked at the design, we were thinking about making a couple of suites in here,” said Karam, whose father, James J. Karam, is president and CEO of First Bristol. “But then only the people who got those suites could use it. This way, it’s special and everyone can kind of use it.”
The Karams want people to use that room to stay in-house when they do. Packaging that room with special room rates is just one of the options that First Bristol is hoping will help to establish it in a hotel market that in the past year has seen its occupancy and daily room rates fall.
Hampton Inn & Suites is also offering a complimentary meeting room to groups that book 10 or more rooms. And with business and leisure travel expected to be slow for the near future, most other local hotels also have started repackaging their in-house amenities with lower room rates to draw in guests.
Inclusive packages are quickly becoming the usual in the Providence market, where room occupancy fell 3.8 percent in 2008, Martha J. Sheridan, president and CEO of the Providence-Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, said last week. She added that although occupancy was down in Providence to 60.7 percent last year, it was still above New England’s 59.4 percent occupancy and the country’s 60.4 percent occupancy.
Predicting whether the summer and fall business and leisure travel will pick up in Rhode Island is difficult, Sheridan says.
“There have been a lot of cutbacks in those areas,” she said. “In order to predict [fall business], we would have to know whether the economy was going to make a turn.”
Hotels have responded to the uncertainty by packaging amenities, said Renaissance Providence Hotel Director of Sales and Marketing Stephen Nass. Many of the packages that his hotel is pushing include breakfast or dinner at Temple, the hotel’s in-house restaurant. Such packages always have been common for leisure travel, but now Renaissance is pitching it to its group clients.
“We try to really look at adding value to packages, instead of just discounting rates,” he said. “That isn’t a tool that’s going to get us to the promised land. I think clients are going to want more value – they know what’s fair.”
NYLO Providence/Warwick, which opened last year in Warwick, is offering a similar package. Its “Stimulus Rate Package” is for a $129-a-night room that comes with a $50 credit for the in-hotel restaurant, The Loft.
High-end hotels are feeling the bite of the economy as well, Newport Harbor Corporation Director of Sales Stewart Kiely said. That’s why Newport’s Castle Hill, a Relais & Chateaux luxury property, is now offering a “Spring Break Package” that includes breakfast, dinner and tickets to one of the Newport mansions museums. That two-night package runs from $845 to $1,996 and is about 20 percent below what the combined market rate of its contents would be, Kiely said.
The hotelis trying to create value for customers. This spring, it’s launching a “loyalty” rewards program – The Agassiz Club – to keep its returning-guest rate up. “Even though we’re kind of a luxury product, there’s no doubt about it, we’re impacted by [the economy] for sure,” Kiely said. “Although because we’re a little boutique hotel, we haven’t been as impacted as a larger hotel.”
And First Bristol’s Jeffrey Karam acknowledged that now is not the best time to try to build a client base in the hotel business. That’s why First Bristol employees have been inviting everyone they can think of to tour the new hotel. Not only have they been bringing tourism representatives through, but they have also been heavily marketing to financial and professional companies in Providence’s Financial District, the tiny cluster of buildings where the Hampton Inn & Suites is the only hotel.
“We just want to get people in the door,” Karam said. •
