Downtown Denver hotel opening this summer will boast highest open-air rooftop bar in the city
The first dual-branded hotel combining a Marriott brand with a Starwood brand to open since the hotel companies’ high-profile merger last year will be in downtown Denver.
And that hotel will boast the highest open-air rooftop bar in the city, project officials say.
White Lodging’s Le Meridien/AC Hotels Denver Downtown, at 15th and California streets, is on schedule to open by late summer with 495 guest rooms, 12,000 square feet of event space and 54thirty Rooftop, the rooftop bar on the 20th floor.
The hotel brands, which are new to Denver, feature a more European sensibility — Le Meridien, a legacy Starwood brand, hails from France, while Marriott’s AC Hotel got its start in Spain.
Marriott and Starwood merged in September in a $13 billion deal that made Marriott the largest hotel chain in the world.
Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson was in Denver this week to tour the site and sat down for a quick interview in one of Le Meridien’s model rooms.
Q: Denver has really been a hotbed for hotel development as we’ve come out of this last recession. What is it about Denver that is so appealing to global hospitality brands like Marriott?
A: Denver and Colorado more broadly benefit from having multiple drivers of demand. You’ve obviously got enormous natural attractions here for leisure business. Maybe I shouldn’t even limit it to natural. You’ve got ski country, which in winter and summer is a spectacular place to go. But you’ve got sports and you’ve got music and a number of things that are strong leisure draws. Leisure business is very vibrant because of it.
The commercial segment in Denver, too, is robust. You’re seeing good corporate growth. Denver is a very attractive place for people to live and therefore an attractive place for companies to set up shop. And, of course, it’s a strong group market. You get all of those things driving together.
When you look at Denver specifically, you see here something that’s happening across the country, across the world but that is particularly vibrant in Denver, which is this trend toward urbanization. If you think about the way our urban development was happening 20 years ago, most of the action was in the suburbs. That’s because that’s where people wanted to live. You had office in suburbs, you had residential development in suburbs. Suburbs are still really important but they are less compelling as a destination than a vibrant urban core. When you look at Denver, you see a dramatic evolution of the city in a way that makes it that much more compelling.
Q: The property we’re touring is a dual-branded hotel that really personifies the big news for Marriott last year, the acquisition of Starwood. You’ve got a Starwood property and you’ve got a Marriott property operating under the same roof. Why is this model popular?
A: Land is expensive, but even beyond that, construction is quite expensive. So it’s a question of how do you maximize the return in order to make these projects make financial sense. The theory here is that by having more than one brand on a site, you’re drawing customers that are drawn to two different products, instead of just one. In a sense, you’ve got twice the demand drivers to tap into.
You can further share, if you will, the common costs that are necessary to develop a single hotel. Back-of-the-house kitchens, back-of-the-house associate space, employee space, but also front-of-the-house things like a fitness center, the ability to share a restaurant perhaps, the ability to share meeting space perhaps. So, you end up with essentially twice the demand you can tap into but less than twice the cost.
From a hotel perspective, an operator perspective or branding perspective, it’s a way of having more than one of your brands represented in a market. That’s a good thing. The more those brands are distributed, the better they are.
Q: We’re about eight months into the Marriott-Starwood merger. How are things going? And what can customers expect going forward as you continue to merge the two operations?
It’s gone great, it really has. The biggest customer piece was announced the day we closed the transaction — the ability of SPG members and Marriott Rewards members to link their accounts, have their elite status matched in whatever the highest level was for both programs and, most importantly, be able to simply transfer points from one program to the other so they could redeem across the entire portfolio of 6,000-plus hotels.
It was a total surprise to our customers — by and large, never been done before. The biggest mergers in the travel space have been airlines, not hotel companies, and in most of the airline circumstances, it could be a year, it could be longer than that.
We have just completed eight general manager meetings around the world, the first general manager meetings since the transaction closed. We’ve been bringing together Marriott GMs and Starwood GMs, and we did those in Toronto, Mexico City, Nashville, Dallas, Dubai, London, Macau and New Orleans.
It was absolutely fabulous — the sense of momentum in the company is extraordinary strong. People are excited about the future and people are working hard, to be sure, because we’re combining systems and we’re doing all sorts of other integration work that has to get done.
Q: There’s a growing group of travelers who want to experience new cities like a local — they’re looking for what they see as a more authentic or unique experience than say, a hard-branded Westin. How can Marriott compete with the growing popularity of startups like Airbnb and other options out there?
A: People want to have an experience that reflects something local, something unique. Increasingly, you see in the design that we’re doing with our hotels that local flavor coming through. You see it in the art that’s in these two hotels, all curated from local Denver artists. You’ll see it in the food and beverage that is offered, including local beers and local spirits and concepts which are unique. We will compete very well there.
We’ve also done recently an investment with a company called PlacePass, which is a virtual concierge helping you to plan your trip before you arrive. If I want to do a bike tour in Denver, if I want to set up something with a local chef, if I want to have a unique tour of some of the historical sites in Denver or Colorado, all those things can be set up, and we can offer those kinds of experiences.
When it comes to competing with independent hotels or with Airbnb, I think we compete extraordinarily well through service, through value and through product quality. While people will talk about local experiences, they also want to make sure they’re cared for well and they’re not disappointed in their stay and they don’t end up with an experience which is somehow significantly different or less than what they anticipated. We compete extraordinarily well in all those spaces. So, bring it on.
Source: TheKnow.denverpost.com
And that hotel will boast the highest open-air rooftop bar in the city, project officials say.
White Lodging’s Le Meridien/AC Hotels Denver Downtown, at 15th and California streets, is on schedule to open by late summer with 495 guest rooms, 12,000 square feet of event space and 54thirty Rooftop, the rooftop bar on the 20th floor.
The hotel brands, which are new to Denver, feature a more European sensibility — Le Meridien, a legacy Starwood brand, hails from France, while Marriott’s AC Hotel got its start in Spain.
Marriott and Starwood merged in September in a $13 billion deal that made Marriott the largest hotel chain in the world.
Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson was in Denver this week to tour the site and sat down for a quick interview in one of Le Meridien’s model rooms.
Q: Denver has really been a hotbed for hotel development as we’ve come out of this last recession. What is it about Denver that is so appealing to global hospitality brands like Marriott?
A: Denver and Colorado more broadly benefit from having multiple drivers of demand. You’ve obviously got enormous natural attractions here for leisure business. Maybe I shouldn’t even limit it to natural. You’ve got ski country, which in winter and summer is a spectacular place to go. But you’ve got sports and you’ve got music and a number of things that are strong leisure draws. Leisure business is very vibrant because of it.
The commercial segment in Denver, too, is robust. You’re seeing good corporate growth. Denver is a very attractive place for people to live and therefore an attractive place for companies to set up shop. And, of course, it’s a strong group market. You get all of those things driving together.
When you look at Denver specifically, you see here something that’s happening across the country, across the world but that is particularly vibrant in Denver, which is this trend toward urbanization. If you think about the way our urban development was happening 20 years ago, most of the action was in the suburbs. That’s because that’s where people wanted to live. You had office in suburbs, you had residential development in suburbs. Suburbs are still really important but they are less compelling as a destination than a vibrant urban core. When you look at Denver, you see a dramatic evolution of the city in a way that makes it that much more compelling.
Q: The property we’re touring is a dual-branded hotel that really personifies the big news for Marriott last year, the acquisition of Starwood. You’ve got a Starwood property and you’ve got a Marriott property operating under the same roof. Why is this model popular?
A: Land is expensive, but even beyond that, construction is quite expensive. So it’s a question of how do you maximize the return in order to make these projects make financial sense. The theory here is that by having more than one brand on a site, you’re drawing customers that are drawn to two different products, instead of just one. In a sense, you’ve got twice the demand drivers to tap into.
You can further share, if you will, the common costs that are necessary to develop a single hotel. Back-of-the-house kitchens, back-of-the-house associate space, employee space, but also front-of-the-house things like a fitness center, the ability to share a restaurant perhaps, the ability to share meeting space perhaps. So, you end up with essentially twice the demand you can tap into but less than twice the cost.
From a hotel perspective, an operator perspective or branding perspective, it’s a way of having more than one of your brands represented in a market. That’s a good thing. The more those brands are distributed, the better they are.
Q: We’re about eight months into the Marriott-Starwood merger. How are things going? And what can customers expect going forward as you continue to merge the two operations?
It’s gone great, it really has. The biggest customer piece was announced the day we closed the transaction — the ability of SPG members and Marriott Rewards members to link their accounts, have their elite status matched in whatever the highest level was for both programs and, most importantly, be able to simply transfer points from one program to the other so they could redeem across the entire portfolio of 6,000-plus hotels.
It was a total surprise to our customers — by and large, never been done before. The biggest mergers in the travel space have been airlines, not hotel companies, and in most of the airline circumstances, it could be a year, it could be longer than that.
We have just completed eight general manager meetings around the world, the first general manager meetings since the transaction closed. We’ve been bringing together Marriott GMs and Starwood GMs, and we did those in Toronto, Mexico City, Nashville, Dallas, Dubai, London, Macau and New Orleans.
It was absolutely fabulous — the sense of momentum in the company is extraordinary strong. People are excited about the future and people are working hard, to be sure, because we’re combining systems and we’re doing all sorts of other integration work that has to get done.
Q: There’s a growing group of travelers who want to experience new cities like a local — they’re looking for what they see as a more authentic or unique experience than say, a hard-branded Westin. How can Marriott compete with the growing popularity of startups like Airbnb and other options out there?
A: People want to have an experience that reflects something local, something unique. Increasingly, you see in the design that we’re doing with our hotels that local flavor coming through. You see it in the art that’s in these two hotels, all curated from local Denver artists. You’ll see it in the food and beverage that is offered, including local beers and local spirits and concepts which are unique. We will compete very well there.
We’ve also done recently an investment with a company called PlacePass, which is a virtual concierge helping you to plan your trip before you arrive. If I want to do a bike tour in Denver, if I want to set up something with a local chef, if I want to have a unique tour of some of the historical sites in Denver or Colorado, all those things can be set up, and we can offer those kinds of experiences.
When it comes to competing with independent hotels or with Airbnb, I think we compete extraordinarily well through service, through value and through product quality. While people will talk about local experiences, they also want to make sure they’re cared for well and they’re not disappointed in their stay and they don’t end up with an experience which is somehow significantly different or less than what they anticipated. We compete extraordinarily well in all those spaces. So, bring it on.
Source: TheKnow.denverpost.com
