The Village Inn Resort & Conference Center is just a block away from Narragansett Town Beach, the vacation town’s busiest swimming spot, so it’s never been difficult drawing summer guests.
“Our location’s pretty prime,” General Manager Kevin F. Welch said last week, looking out at the ocean from one of the 62 guest rooms.
What’s been difficult, he said, has been drawing a winter crowd. And since Welch took over at general manager about a year and a half ago, he’s tried to revamp both the image and physical appearance of the hotel to do just that.
The hotel is owned by New Jersey-based investor Piyush Patel, who also owns the Atlantic House in Narragansett. Over the past year, Welch and Patel have overseen the first phases of the Village Inn’s renovations.
Along with new carpeting throughout, each room now has an installed a fridge and a bar. Many rooms have granite counter tops – and new couches, chairs, custom-designed beds and bed clothes designed by East Greenwich’s Joan Bishop Interiors. The two-room executive suites have Jacuzzi tubs.
The renovations, which should be finished this year, include the addition of business space, complete with computers and fax and copy machines near the hotel’s lobby. The lobby has new tile floors and furniture.
According to Narragansett town records, the 1.47-acre property and building are worth $6.64 million. Built in 1983, the hotel is 46,523 square feet. Renovations so far have cost more than $200,000, which doesn’t include the $38,000 yet to be spent to outfit each room with a flat-panel television, Welch said.
But it’s not just outdated interior designs that were holding the hotel back from its full potential, Welch said. Since it was built in 1983, it had deteriorated to a place that was more welcoming to the party crowd than to weddings and business clients.
“There’s nothing wrong with college kids coming in with a bag full of beer and drinking away and partying,” he said. “But that’s not what we’re doing here. That’s what we want to get away from. We want families.”
In the first few weeks that Welch was at the inn, several guests complained that other guests had kept them up. Others said their rooms weren’t even half as nice as those represented in promotional material and demanded their money back. Welch estimates that he had to reimburse customers about $2,000 in those first two weeks.
“They were mad and rightly so,” Welch said. “Now the brochures represent what we have – I’m big on that. If you see something in the brochure and ask where it is, I’m able to point it out.”
Now that he’s learned the layout of the hotel, he’s becoming adept at room placement, too. Even if there is a loud wedding with people celebrating on the hotel’s main deck, it shouldn’t detract from other guests’ stays, Welch said.
“Now, you get up in the morning and the room you thought you ordered, you actually got,” he said.
In an effort to attract more of the business and adult crowd in the winter months, Welch has begun to expand the hotel’s services.
The hotel already had a restaurant, the 70-seat Amalfi Restaurant. Welch has overseen creation of Amalfi Fine Catering and the renovation of a formerly private breakfast restaurant into the Hotel Café. The latter serves free continental breakfasts, complete with juice, coffee, muffins and made-to-order waffles.
This winter, Welch has started a “Dine-and-Stay” marketing campaign throughout New England. He’s offering hotel rooms and dinner for $99 a night for couples – the base price for the lowest-cost room.
“I’m doing that to promote all the changes,” Welch said. “I want people to see it and at this time of year, in this area, you have to cater to the locals. … I’m trying to recognize our local population and give them a deal in the restaurant and let them come over and stay for less than $100 on a weekend night. So when summer comes and they have friends or relatives who want to stay in town, they’re going to be … giving back to us.”
Those lowest-cost rooms run about $70 per night in the off season, but jump to about $190 per summer night, Welch said. Higher-end rooms run about $130 per night in the off-season and can be about $230 per summer night.
The recession last year cut into the hotel’s business, causing gross revenue to fall to about $1.25 million, an approximately 3 percent decrease from the year before, Welch said. Welch has cut about 10 percent from all room prices to make the hotel more attractive. And the renovations and renewed marketing campaign should help make up those losses, he said.
On a tour of the building last week, Welch said the 300-person grand ballroom has been busy this winter, with events held the last two weekends and it’s already set to be very busy this summer. He said a few summer weekends are already full and there are 90 weddings planned for the coming summer, already above average.
“People have saved and they’re going to get married,” he said. “The economy maybe dictates a honeymoon, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be dictating the day of the wedding.” •
