Warwick tourism officials want their city to be the Kissimmee-St. Cloud of Rhode Island.
The city is becoming a boomtown for hotels that serve business travelers who do business in Providence and out-of-town tourists who want to lay their heads on a pillow somewhere between the capital city to the north and Newport and Block Island to the south.
Two hotels opened in Warwick this spring, and with concrete plans for four more hotels in the next couple years and speculative plans for a few more than that, the city is seriously positioned to rival both Providence and Newport as a way station for tourists in the state.
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Except Warwick is not expected to rival Providence, Newport or Block Island as a tourist destination. In that way, Warwick is becoming Rhode Island’s version of Kissimmee-St. Cloud, the anonymous Florida city that welcomes 7 million annual visitors to its hotels and book rooms there mostly because the city is a short car ride to Disney World in Orlando.
“People fly to Orlando to go to Disney World, but they stay in Kissimmee-St. Cloud, because it’s more affordable,” said William Facente, director of economic development for the city of Warwick.
In recent years, Warwick has scored several new hotels by touting its access to T.F. Green Airport and both of the major interstate highways in the state, its central location in Rhode Island and its low cost of real estate relative to Providence and Newport.
“We’re more affordable than Providence and Newport, we have easy access to the airport, and us being centrally located makes it easy to get to all other destinations, including Foxwoods (Resort and Casino) and the Cape (Cod),” said Lisa McDuff, Warwick’s tourism director.
The city has 15 hotels, including two that opened in May – the Homewood Suites by Hilton, an 82-room hotel at 33 International Way, and the Courtyard by Marriott, a 92-room hotel at 57 Jefferson Park Road.
Warwick also has four hotels on the drawing board: The first, Hilton Garden, a 170-room full-service hotel, banquet and convention center and day spa, with plans for a celebrity chef restaurant and retail shops, will be located in the Warwick Station redevelopment district. Construction is scheduled to begin in September and be completed in one year.
Across the street, Warwick developer Joseph Piscopio is planning a 160-room hotel. Piscopio has not yet announced the hotel chain.
A 200-room hotel is expected to occupy Warwick’s historic Pontiac Mills building, a former Fruit of the Loom factory on the Pawtuxet River, said Facente. And two more hotels are slated to go up next to each other at the intersection of Kilvert Street and Jefferson Boulevard, said Facente.
Yet another hotel could possibly be built in the Warwick Station district on Post Road, he said.
“There’s also talk of two or three others that we’re waiting to see what happens,” said Facente.
No economic study has quantified the financial impact that the hotels may have on the city. But the city received approximately $1 million last year in hotel room tax revenue, and that dollar figure has gone up by “a couple of hundred thousand dollars” each year in the past few years, as new hotels have opened in the city, said Facente.
After adding in real estate taxes, property taxes and employment taxes, and then the boon that increased number of people that the hotels bring to restaurants and shopping and sales receipts – the economic impact of the hotels runs into the millions, said Facente.
With so many hotels going up in Warwick, the danger is that the city will create a hotel glut, Facente said. But he added that the city’s forecast shows that a glut will not occur with the addition of the hotels currently on the radar. Warwick’s average daily occupancy rates for hotel rooms are consistently equal to a little bit higher than Providence’s, and its average daily rates are a little bit lower.
“The fear that we have and that many of the hotels already here have is that
the market at some point will start yielding diminishing returns. We haven’t
hit that yet. The market analyses and feasibility studies show that there’s
still a strong market for additional rooms,” he said.
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