It would be hard to convince corporate travelers to do business here, with no accommodations for customers and prospects.
That’s why five years ago, Hamilton community and business leaders say they came together to redevelop the site of the former Hamiltonian hotel to today’s Courtyard by Marriott.
Since then, Courtyard has become the city’s gathering place and key to revitalization efforts, local leaders say.
“I’m a firm believer in order to have a first-class city, it needs a first-class hotel,” said Craig Wilks, president of Wilks Insurance Agency. Wilks was president of the Hamilton Community Foundation board at the time Courtyard opened, and was involved in its redevelopment.
The Courtyard by Marriott opened in March 2009 on Riverfront Plaza with views of the Great Miami River. The six-floor hotel has 120 rooms, 7,000-square-feet of flexible banquet and meeting space, and the restaurant Plaza One Grille.
Concord Hospitality Enterprises Co. purchased and renovated the former Hamiltonian property at a total cost of approximately $12 million. A portion of the funds was raised by Hamilton Community Foundation from local citizens recognizing a dire need.
More than 20 years old at the time, the Hamiltonian was beginning to “show its age.” It wasn’t generating enough business to pay its debts and invest in the property, leaders recall.
Bent on Hamilton having a first-class hotel, business and government stakeholders learned what they could about the hotel industry. They sought a well-recognized and successful operator to breathe life in the struggling facility, Wilks said.
“It was in desperate need of a major infusion of money to make it viable again,” Wilks said.
“You have to have a quality place for visitors in the community to stay. It sometimes is a first impression and you want that first impression to be positive,” he said.
Now visitors to Fitton Center for Creative Arts, Miami University, Jungle Jim’s International Market, Joyce Park and other area attractions often stay overnight at the Courtyard. Sporting events and life events such as weddings, birthdays, class reunions and funerals attract travelers to Hamilton, said Shawn Stidham, the hotel’s sales director.
Greater Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and Hamilton Rotary Club regularly meet at the hotel.
“The idea behind this hotel… was this was going to be a key part of the revitalization and redevelopment of downtown Hamilton. With that, we need to make sure we’re up to the quality and the level of service and exceeding that to convince people that Hamilton’s a great place to do business,” Stidham said.
Other businesses have invested in downtown because of the hotel, says City Manager Joshua Smith.
In the time since it opened, other developments in the city’s core include the opening of Mercantile Lofts, Butler Tech School of the Arts and RiversEdge Park and Amphitheater.
“The Hamilton Courtyard by Marriott was the catalytic development necessary downtown” and provided “momentum to propel other projects forward,” Smith said in an email. “As an example, First Financial Bank would not have invested $1 million to create a corporate training facility in 2012 at their downtown office building without the Marriott being in close proximity.”
Hotel operators say their project has been part of Hamilton’s development efforts, but the job isn’t done.
It’s important “that the area around us grows and develops because if that doesn’t happen, then our job is even more difficult,” Stidham said.
“If there’s no reason to come to Hamilton… it doesn’t matter what we do,” he said.
Success story
Revenues have grown at the hotel every year since its opened, Stidham said.
Lodging taxes collected by city government on bookings have risen from $111,876.74 in 2010, the first full year of operation, to $140,758.11 in 2013, according to local government records.
“When I first came here, there were people who said they thought it would be closed in six months,” Stidham said. Instead “we’ve seen steady growth over those last five years.”
Whereas hotels in West Chester Twp. and Fairfield tend to attract the weekday business traveler, and hotels in Monroe, Middletown and other communities along Interstate 75 attract pass-through drivers, Hamilton and Oxford tend to attract weekend visitors, said Mark Hecquet, executive director of Butler County Visitors Bureau.
“The renovation to the Courtyard and the elements they put in draws it into the 21st century in terms of amenities, look, feel,” Hecquet said. “It’s done everything it was supposed to do.”
If the project would not have happened, “think of all the things you couldn’t have or couldn’t hold in downtown Hamilton if there wasn’t a hotel,” Wilks said.
The ongoing challenge is generating the business activity to fill hotel rooms more often during the week and luring visitors off I-75, Hecquet and Stidham said.
Hamilton’s Courtyard by Marriott opened at the height of a national economic downtown that began at the end of 2007, lasted midway through 2009 and has yet to fully recover.
“It has been at times challenging because Hamilton, as much of the Midwest, and much of the country really, got affected in a negative way by the Great Recession,” said Mark Laport, co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Concord Hospitality, headquartered in Raleigh, N.C.
Though slowly growing, the Hamilton hotel has shown improvement and Concord is committed to the asset long-term, Laport said.
“We think that the Courtyard, being where it is in the community, it has been a key focus of redevelopment of downtown Hamilton,” Laport said.
A hotel “seems to be a missing link that cities struggle without. With it, it can help drive economic development in a way that is pivotal in maintaining growth in the community,” he said.
History
The Hamiltonian and later Courtyard by Marriott share similarities in the way they were opened. In both cases, key community stakeholders recognized the need for the hotel, and pooled their money to help pay the cost.
The difference was major corporations invested in opening the Hamiltonian, Wilks said. The Hamiltonian opened in 1985 and was owned by BryLyn Inc., Tipton & Associates and 50 local citizen-investors.
This time, there were only citizens reaching into their pockets.
“All communities aren’t like Hamilton,” Wilks said. People “not only give their time, but their money when they see the need is great enough.”
When it became clear “something had to be done” about the Hamiltonian in more recent years, the Hamilton Community Foundation did something it had never done before; it got involved in a private development project, said John Guidugli, the foundation’s president and chief executive officer.
The Hamilton Foundation purchased the property at a discount.
To find a hotel operator, the foundation and other Hamilton representatives turned to the Springfield Inn, which had also been operated by BryLyn. The Springfield Inn had been redeveloped by the Turner Foundation and Concord. Liking what they saw, Hamilton leaders asked Concord to consider a similar project in their city.
However, the Hamilton foundation had no intention of owning the Hamilton hotel long-term as the Turner Foundation owns the Springfield hotel, Guidugli said. Concord purchased the Hamilton hotel and manages it.
Also, the foundation turned to the community to raise $6.6 million to invest in the project, Guidugli said.
Key to the hotel’s turnaround was franchising a recognized hotel brand, Guidugli said. By opening the hotel as a Marriott, there’s brand recognition, an expectation for a certain level of quality and service, and a loyalty program for frequent travelers.
“It needed to be a Class A hotel that would attract people to the community,” Guidugli said.
“They’ve got the product in place,” he said. “We need to provide the business activity.”
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