Getting Away From It All Without Going Far

Regularly, about every two months, Michael and Nancy Kump are struck with the desire to flee.

Escape the job, they think. Pack the bags. Lock up the house. Get out of familiar surroundings and go someplace where the champagne is always cold, the pillows are always fluffy and the phone never rings.

So, about six times a year, the Kumps leave their Los Angeles home for a vacation.

They go to Los Angeles.

“People look at us kind of funny when we tell them,” Nancy said, “but it seems so normal to us. I’m a firm believer that you can run away from your problems, so once every couple of months we run away and stay at a hotel.”

The Kumps and thousands of couples like them make up a particular sort of clientele that is being enthusiastically cultivated by many Southern California hotels. They are what might be called weekend urban vacationers, who, because of obligations at home or lack of time for an extended holiday, regularly check into nearby hotels for a weekend stay. There, they say, they can relax, enjoy a change of scenery, and let others do the cooking and cleaning.

For many hotels--particularly city hotels whose rooms are occupied on weekdays by traveling business people who usually do not stay on through the weekend--these short-time vacationers can represent a substantial increase in revenue. Consequently, many hotels woo the potential weekend guest with special package deals that can include decreased rates for rooms and a wide variety of amenities such as health spa privileges, breakfast in bed, discounts on admission to area attractions, limousine service and other forms of pampering.

“It’s a marketing concept that’s been around for a long time in the resort market, but the corporate market hotels have gotten into it more and more in the last 10 to 15 years,” said Haley Powers, a convention sales manager for the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.

What most of the hotels are selling, as part of those packages, is romance. It can take the form of champagne served with breakfast in bed, fresh roses on the nightstand, complimentary gifts, dinner reservations in a corner booth, sinfully rich menus or, simply, someone specially detailed to do the fetching, carrying, cleaning and otherwise keeping the outside world at bay.

For the Kumps, their latest haven of in-town indulgence was the Biltmore Hotel, where they stayed on a recent weekend on the hotel’s “Gold Room” package. The $115-per-night rate included a suite with a living room area, continental breakfasts with the morning paper, use of the hotel’s health club, downtown shuttle and limousine to Beverly Hills and the services of a butler stationed on each floor. The normal daily rate for the room alone is $175.

“We’ve stayed in a number of L.A. hotels because we’ve found that you can get a beautiful room for bargain prices,” said Nancy Kump, a vice president at a Los Angeles public relations firm. “And it really does give you the feeling of getting out of town. Every place we’ve gone in the city has a different personality and we like the action of the city. We’re city people, basically.”

Michael Kump, an attorney, said that “it’s often difficult, if not impossible for us to get out of town. Our jobs keep us here. Nancy’s had to cancel two week-long vacations in the last two months. So this is one way we can do something for ourselves and get away together.”

The ‘Extras’ Draw Guests

In some cases, it is not discount rates that draw weekenders, but the nature of the “extras” some hotels design into their packages. Through the use of special events or services, city hotels sometimes attempt to provide their guests with a resort-like atmosphere.

The Meridien Hotel in Newport Beach, for instance, has included in a series of one-time weekend packages such events as a Bastille Day celebration, a cycling tour of Newport Beach, tours to Mission San Juan Capistrano and trips to local shopping centers. The ongoing weekend package includes a discounted room rate, complimentary champagne and fruit and an 8 p.m. checkout time if the guests attend the Sunday lobster cookout at the hotel.

At the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, two weekend packages--called the Classic Weekend and the Romantic Interlude--include such amenities as daily bottles of chilled champagne with strawberries, fresh flowers in the room and breakfast in bed. Helen Chaplin, the hotel’s spokesperson, said the prices of the rooms are not heavily discounted, however.

A hotelier’s truism, according to Powers, holds that “there are only three things that will sell your property: location, location and location.” However, hotels in locations considered less than glamorous also attempt to benefit through the use of weekend packages.

The Airport Sheraton Hotel, on the Century Boulevard approach to Los Angeles International Airport, offers a Romance Package and a Deluxe Romance Package, both of which cause the hotel’s weekend occupancy rate to rise, said John Butler, the hotel’s assistant front office manager. And, ironically, the reason has to do with the Sheraton’s location, he said.

“I think a lot of people on weekends like to be near an airport so they can fly out easily,” he said.

Special Packages

Other hotels offer packages with a tie-in to local events. For about two months, the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel in Costa Mesa, for instance, offered what it called an “Encore” package to coincide with September’s opening of the nearby Orange County Performing Arts Center. While the South Coast Plaza, like all hotels in the Westin chain, routinely offers rooms at half price on weekends, the Encore package featured deluxe rooms in the $128-to-$164 price range (daily, based on double occupancy) for $65 a night.

Jim and Teresa Comber of Manhattan Beach decided to take advantage of the Encore package to do some shopping at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza shopping center, which is across the street from the hotel.

“We checked in Saturday afternoon, did some shopping, spent the night very relaxed and finished up the next day,” said Comber. “All we had to do was walk across the street. It was beautiful.”

And, like other weekend hotel guests, Comber said he looked on his stay as a getaway.

“It’s nice that you don’t have to look around the house or check on work that might be in your briefcase or do any cleaning or the laundry or mow the lawn. You don’t have any of those things visually presenting themselves. You get very relaxed.”

Bed-&-Breakfast Inns

The cut rates that many hotels offer do not extend to the more intimate world of Southern California’s bed-and-breakfast inns, however. Like resort hotels (such as Orange County’s Ritz Carlton), most B-and-Bs do almost all their business on weekends.

For example, the Seal Beach Inn. Located in a quiet residential neighborhood near the beach, the inn has offered package deals to guests for about two years. On a recent weekend, Ed Wallin and his wife, Aurora, indulged in one of the most lavish, an exercise in specific eating that the management calls the Chocolate Love Inn.

For $215, a couple can stay for one night in one of the inn’s better rooms and be served “more chocolate than you could ever want to eat,” said Nancy Lasater, in charge of sales and marketing for the inn. Guests are served chocolate cookies, candy, sodas, pastries, cake, ice cream.

“We’d heard of it before and thought it was really a charming idea,” said Aurora as she sipped a morning chocolate soda in front of the inn’s fireplace, “but we just kept finding chocolate hidden in the funniest places all over our room.”

Immersed in Chocolate

Ed Wallin, who is an associate justice of the 4th District Court of Appeals in Orange County, said he and his wife, an attorney, couldn’t arrange to be married at the inn a year ago, so they decided to spend their first anniversary there, immersed in chocolate.

“I like it here because no one can find me,” Wallin said. “It’s always nice to get away to a different place once in a while, but sometimes you just can’t travel far. I like this better than a large hotel because it’s quieter and calmer. At a hotel I feel like I should be dressed up and carrying a briefcase--doing work.”

It is, finally, that sense of informality, paired with the opportunity to allow oneself to be indulged, that seems to appeal most to those who choose the short, local hotel vacation over the more grandiose one elsewhere.

“If you’re flying or driving to someplace far away, it can be something of a hassle,” Michael Kump said. “And a lot of times it just isn’t that restful. Planned vacations, to a certain extent, can be very stressful.

“But staying here,” he said, sipping a glass of champagne and gesturing expansively around the suite, “you’re just not as concerned. I was just thinking of taking the hotel limo home to feed the cat.”