Marriott suites geared to non-leisure travelers

A local hotel development team has opened Newport County’s first extended-stay hotel, in Middletown, offering rooms similar to small apartments to corporate project teams, military personnel and others staying in the region for weeks or longer.
The Residence Inn by Marriott Newport/Middletown was scheduled to open Aug. 13 on West Main Road in the heart of Middletown’s business district.
The 97-suite hotel was developed by and is co-owned by James J. Karam and Rocky Kempenaar, who also own the Hampton Inn & Suites in Newport. The hotel is managed by First Bristol Corp. of Fall River. Jeffrey Miller, the hotel’s general manager and director of operations, leads a team of 40 associates at the newly constructed facility.
“This new hotel was designed to be a home away from home and provides a residential atmosphere and spacious accommodations for guest comfort,” Jim Paulon, the hotel’s director of sales, said in a press release.
Marriott’s Residence Inn hotels are designed as all-suite hotels that offer studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom suites, each with a full kitchen and separate areas for sleeping, eating, working and relaxing.
Each kitchen comes equipped with a coffee maker, microwave oven, full-sized appliances and free high-speed Internet access. A complimentary hot breakfast buffet is available each morning in the lobby area.
Other hotel facilities and services include an indoor swimming pool, whirlpool, exercise room, a social room, weeknight social hour, business center and guest laundry. The hotel also offers a meeting room with 578 square feet of meeting space to accommodate small meetings and functions of up to 43 people.
In addition to typical vacationers and business travelers, Karam and Kempenaar expect the hotel to provide corporate housing and temporary housing for personnel at the Navy base in Newport and employees of Raytheon Co. and other businesses in the corporate parks in and around Aquidneck Island and Newport.
Rates for the hotel’s suites will vary depending on the length of stay, Paulon said.
The hotel is among a handful of new hotels and inns to open in the area or undergo significant upgrades this spring and summer: The Hilltop Inn recently opened it doors, and the Hotel Viking and the Newport Harbor Hotel both completed extensive renovations.
But plans for a large-scale development project that would have provided additional business to all the area’s hotels – and perhaps the Residence Inn by Marriott Newport/Middletown in particular – were recently derailed.
In late July, Cranston-based development company The Procaccianti Group scuttled its plan to build O2 Newport, a $1.4 billion mixed-use development in the underutilized North End of Newport, after the General Assembly failed to extend a tax agreement that would have aided the project.
The project would have included a $155 million purchase of Newport Grand and the development of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and other recreational and entertainment facilities, and was intended to create 2,800 permanent jobs. •