Hotel ‘upped their game’

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This article was published 18/01/2017 (3270 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg hotel is celebrating its 40th birthday in style with a soon-to-be-completed $10-million renovation.

The Holiday Inn Winnipeg Airport West’s 2½-year reno project, which will be completed in about three months, involved stripping the 228 guest rooms down to the bare studs and completely redoing them.

The lobby, lounge and banquet rooms have also been extensively remodelled, and the restaurant will be getting a makeover beginning next month.

The aim was to give the main floor a more modern, spacious, open-concept feel, and the changes are already getting rave reviews from the president and CEO of the Manitoba Hotel Association (MHA).

“You walk into that hotel now and it’s so wide open,” Scott Jocelyn said in an interview Tuesday. “I think they did just a fantastic job, and I hope it translates into lots of business for them.”

Jocelyn said these kinds of property upgrades are not only exciting to see from an association standpoint, they’re a necessity in today’s highly competitive hotel marketplace.

“The people we cater to are very, very demanding. They are coming in (to the city), and it’s a very competitive marketplace. There are lot of choices, and if you’re not putting your best foot forward, you can be left behind.”

Increased competition is one of the things that motived the hotel’s owner — Winnipeg-based Ladco Co. Ltd. — to undertake the biggest renovation project in the hotel’s history.

A total of 10 new hotels have opened in the Winnipeg/Headingley area in the last five years, and several existing ones have undergone renovations. The new additions include eight hotels, with a total of about 800 rooms, in the airport area alone, said Holiday Inn Winnipeg Airport West general manager Bruce MacKay.

MacKay said consumers tend to gravitate to new hotels, so when all of these new hotels arrived on the scene, “It really forced everybody to up their game.”

MacKay said it had been about a dozen years since the Holiday Inn Winnipeg Airport West had undergone its last major renovation. Its licence with the Holiday Inn chain was also coming up for renewal in 2014, so the timing was right in that sense, as well, he added.

MacKay said the guest-room renovations included installing new washrooms, electrical systems, Internet connections and interactive televisions. State-of-the-art audio-video equipment was also installed in all of the banquet and meeting rooms, and nine new big-screen TVs and a 10-tap, beer-tower system were added in the lounge.

As part of the guest-room renovations, the hotel created 16 junior suites, which are larger than a regular suite and include a sitting area; two family suites, which feature two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a sitting area; and two specially equipped suites for guests with physical handicaps.

MacKay said about 40 per cent of the hotel’s guests are leisure travellers, another 40 per cent are corporate travellers, and the remaining 20 per cent of its business is government- or meeting-related.

Like most other hotels in the city, the Holiday Inn Winnipeg Airport West saw its occupancy rates decline after all the new hotels opened, MacKay said. In some cases, it lost customers to the newer properties. But with more hotels, it also meant the pie was being divided more ways, he added.

Jocelyn agreed there are times when the supply of hotel rooms outstrips the demand. But he and MacKay, who is chairman of the association, said occupancy rates should improve as the newly expanded RBC Convention Centre Winnipeg attracts more national and international conventions.

“We’ve also already seen a lot of our customers starting to come back, and we’ve had some terrific reviews of what we’ve done here,” said MacKay.

“So I definitely think that when it’s all over and done with, we will start to see our customers coming back and improving the business.”

Ladco president Alan Borger said his grandfather, Henry Borger Sr., and his father, Alan Borger Sr., oversaw the construction of the Portage Avenue hotel in 1977.

For most of its first 16 years, it was called the Birchwood Hotel. It has operated under the Holiday Inn banner since 1993.

While it’s Ladco’s only hotel property at the moment, Borger said that could change.

“We like to keep our heads up, and would definitely consider adding rooms if the right opportunity comes up.”

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca