Soon the County’s Largest Innkeeper : Marriott Moves Ahead, Adding and Expanding

Workers for the Marriott Corp. are adding the finishing touches this week to the 15-story, $37.5-million addition to the company’s Newport Beach hotel, a project Marriott hopes will establish the hotel as the premier place to stay in Orange County.

The 202-room addition gives the hotel a total of 601 rooms. In addition to the new tower, Marriott spent $3 million refurbishing the 12-year-old original building and $5 million more expanding the parking lot.

The traditionally styled Newport Beach property is a business and resort hotel, where room rates range from $135 to $165 a night for single occupancy.

But Marriott--striving to keep ahead in the increasingly competitive lodging industry--also is building a chain of mid-market hotels called Courtyard by Marriott and a chain of all-suite hotels called Marriott Suites.

A 150-room Courtyard is under construction at the corner of Harbor and MacArthur Boulevards in Santa Ana and construction is expected to begin within a week on a 254-room Marriott Suites hotel in the Bayview Commercial Center in Newport Beach, the company said.

With the addition of those properties, Marriott, which also operates the 502-room Irvine Marriott and the 1,042-room Anaheim Marriott under contract, will have a total of 2,549 rooms in Orange County, making it the county’s largest innkeeper. In second place is Hilton, with about 2,100 rooms at its two county hotels, in Irvine and Anaheim.

Bill Marriott, chairman, president and chief executive of the Bethesda, Md., company, was in Newport Beach on Wednesday to inspect his newest property and apparently liked what he saw. “This is the best location in the county,” he said, taking in the view of Newport Harbor and the Pacific Ocean from the new tower’s top-floor lounge.

Pronouncing himself “bullish on Southern California,” Marriott said the Newport Beach property will remain a strong player in the increasingly competitive hotel industry.

The new tower also adds 10,000 square feet of meeting and banquet space to the hotel complex.

Marriott said the Newport Center hotel, with an average occupancy rate of 80%, has been among the company’s top performing properties. Citing Orange County’s anticipated growth and expansion, he said he expects it to remain so.

Including the Newport Beach property, Marriott has 20 company-owned hotels worldwide and manages an additional 130 hotels that carry the Marriott name but are owned by outside investors.

Although his company plans to build an average of 10,000 new rooms a year nationally for the remainder of the decade, Marriott predicted that the hotel construction industry in general will “taper off dramatically” when the new tax law takes effect.