Irvine Co. Ponders Conference-Center Hotel on Campus
An unusual $30-million conference-center hotel, which would be the only one of its kind on the West Coast, is being considered for the UC Irvine campus.
The proposed state-of-the-art conference center would be developed by the Irvine Co. and managed by a still undetermined hotel operator. UCI would lease the land--about 15 acres near the College of Medicine--to the developer of the proposed hotel, said William Parker, associate executive vice chancellor at UCI.
Unlike upscale hotels that spend millions of dollars on lavish lobbies and plush rooms, the UCI facility would focus its spending on the latest technical advances for its meeting rooms. Audio-visual equipment would be highly advanced, and meeting rooms would offer such amenities as computer hook-ups, Parker said.
Construction of the 300-room hotel could conceivably begin within two years, said James T. Kelley, president of the Irvine Hotel Co., a division of the Irvine Co. The Irvine Co. is now piecing together an economic analysis of the project, he said.
The project would mark the Irvine Co.’s third entry in the past two years into the hotel market. It owns the Irvine Hilton, which opened last year, and the Four Seasons in Newport Beach, which opened last week. The company also plans to eventually build four hotels totaling 1,900 rooms along coastal property it owns south of Corona del Mar.
UCI is the second public university in California to consider development of a lodging facility on its campus. Last December, Marriott Corp. of Bethesda, Md., proposed a $12-million hotel for the Cal State Fullerton campus. That project would be geared to tourists as well as to the corporate trade. Officials could not be reached Monday regarding the status of the proposed development.
Although the Irvine area has been riddled with new hotel growth in recent years, developers contend that, unlike most commercial hotels, the conference center would cater almost exclusively to the market for small meetings and latch on to the last remaining hotel niche in Orange County.
“It would not compete with any of the upscale hotels in this area,” UCI’s Parker said. “We’re talking about an executive conference center that would be marketed nationwide as a place where small businesses can meet for a few days.”
Varied Events
Typically, the conference facility would be booked by groups of 30 to 40 executives planning two- to four-day stays. Events would range from training sessions and senior-level meetings to awards ceremonies and educational gatherings. The university would also use it for its own in-house conferences, Parker said.
Room rates at the conference facility, which will be similar to the area’s upscale hotels, will include all meals, coffee breaks and use of meeting space.
Industry consultants say corporate executives are attracted by these specialty lodgings, which have recently gained popularity in the United States. “They don’t put you in rooms with folding walls where you can hear the meeting that’s going on next door,” said Helen Gavin, manager at the Newport Beach office of Pannell Kerr Forster’s hotel consulting division. She said there is a strong market for these facilities in Southern California.
But Scanticon Corp., one of the leaders in the conference center industry, recently looked at the UCI proposal and begged off.
“We saw certain parts of Orange County as overbuilt in hotel development,” said Glen Schostak, director of project development for Scanticon. “Remember, we still have to penetrate the commercial market, especially for weekend business.”
Scanticon Corp., a national developer of conference-center hotels, has a 300-room facility in Princeton, N.J. Scanticon recently broke ground on another conference facility in Minneapolis and has plans to build conference-center hotels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco in the next few years.
