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Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024
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SPACE RACE

Hotel Meeting Space Up Only 1%, but More Rooms on Way

Orange County’s hotel landscape has seen some new faces in the past year, but when it comes to meeting space, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

In 1999, hotel meeting space at the 50 largest properties crept up a scant 1% from a year ago, to 887,692 square feet. And Anaheim, the heart of OC’s tourist industry, continues to dominate the market, holding 43% of the county’s space and 13 spots on the list, four of which are among the top 10 positions.

All that, however, will change dramatically over the next few years as new hotels come on line, increasing the county’s meeting space by at least 50%. Anaheim, which alone could see the addition of 200,000 square feet of space, is likely to pull further out in front of other cities. Disney’s Grand Californian, now under construction on the site of California Adventure, Disney’s second gate at Disneyland, alone will add 22,000 square feet of space in Anaheim next year, boosting the county’s total 2.5%. And Garden Grove will get an additional 28,000 square feet of space late this year when Pacific Hospitality Group’s Crowne Plaza hotel, now under construction at Harbor Boulevard and Chapman Avenue, opens. That property alone will increase the county’s inventory by another 3%.

Disneyland Hotel, with 136,000 square feet of meeting space, again is No. 1 on the Business Journal list, a position it has held through the decade this list has been published. That property alone has 15% of the total space available among the hotels on the list,and it lost space in 1998 to the Disneyland expansion.

(For purposes of the list, only space under a permanent roof on hotel property was counted, excluding restaurants.)

Besides Disneyland, Anaheim hotels with the most space are No. 2 Hilton Anaheim and Towers with 94,695 square feet; No. 3 Anaheim Marriott with 54,959 square feet and No. 9 Disneyland Pacific with 23,000 square feet.

Newport Beach continues to hold the second-most space with 96,118 square feet, just 11% of the county total, while Irvine, with 88,154 square feet (10%) and Costa Mesa with 77,264 square feet (9%) are close behind.

Together, Anaheim, Newport Beach, Irvine and Costa Mesa have 73% of the county’s hotel meeting space, though Newport, Irvine and Costa Mesa together don’t equal Anaheim’s share.

No other OC city has more than 4% of the county’s hotel meeting space. And South County (southeast of the John Wayne Airport/Newport Beach area) has a total of 54,417 square feet, just 6% of the entire market and less than each of the largest three Anaheim hotels. About half of the county’s cities don’t have any hotels with enough space to make the list.

Besides Anaheim, the only other city with more than one property among the top 10 is Irvine, whose No. 6 Hyatt Regency with 26,560 square feet and No. 8 Irvine Marriott with 23,123 square feet, are among the county’s busiest meeting venues, according to Oakland-based Hospitality Information Services.

Garden Grove, whose Hyatt Regency Alicante now ranks No. 5 with 31,266 square feet of meeting space, will join Irvine and Anaheim with multiple properties in the top 10 when the Crowne Plaza Hotel, opens. That property will have 28,000 square feet of meeting and ballroom space, which would put it at No. 6 on the current list and displace No. 10 Hilton Waterfront Beach Resort,Huntington Beach’s lone entry on the list,from the top 10.

The Hilton Waterfront, however, is scheduled to get a sister property, the Ocean Grand Resort, and a conference center on the same parcel that would boost available space in Huntington Beach to more than 100,000 square feet.

The largest 10 hotels collectively account for 53% of the total space, the same as a year ago, though total square footage has grown by about 13,000 square feet among these properties. The bulk of that increase is due to a remodel at No. 4 Doubletree Hotel Costa Mesa, which converted a former restaurant to add 11,000 square feet of meeting space, bringing its total to 38,043 square feet and bumping that property up a notch on the list.

Other increases among the top 10 were at the Irvine Marriott, which general manager Ned Snavely said did some “shuffling” to create a small increase and Disneyland Pacific, where an ongoing remake of the Disneyland Resort area was responsible for the addition.

Other properties that added space in the past year were No. 12 Hyatt Newporter, which boosted its total 3% to 20,141 square feet by adding a board room; No. 16 Westin South Coast Plaza, which completed a remodel last year; No. 21 Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, where one salon was omitted from the figures last year; and No. 23 Holiday Inn Buena Park, which had omitted its fireside room from the count a year ago. No. 22 Four Points Sheraton in Fullerton jumped 16% to 13,817 square feet this year, but a property spokesperson attributed that to a miscalculation in 1999.

But though most of the changes on the list have been small, the hotels aren’t sitting still, either.

The Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel will boost its ranking in May, when it opens the Pacific Promenade, a 5,400-square-foot detached building on the resort’s grounds that will be used for meetings and banquets. Director of Sales Chuck Harper said the facility will have a full ocean view and be divisible into three sections. If that space were open now, it would move the Ritz-Carlton up to No. 10 on the list.

And No. 17 Four Seasons Newport Beach, which began managing 4,200 square feet of space at the Clubhouse at Pelican Hill in 1998, soon will take on another approximately 10,000 square feet that has been occupied by the Twin Palms restaurant adjacent to the hotel in Fashion Island. Twin Palms announced earlier this month that it would close its doors at the end of January. Brett Jarvis, director of sales at the Four Seasons, said the hotel plans to do some remodeling and reopen the facility to banquets and special events in May. Jarvis said property owner The Irvine Company asked the hotel to manage the Twin Palms facility.

Meanwhile, No. 14 Radisson Resort Knott’s Berry Farm, which has 13% less space than a year ago at 20,000 square feet, said its space will increase again once the renovation of the hotel is complete. The property, formerly the Buena Park Hotel, was purchased by Knott’s last year. It officially reopened last week as the Radisson Resort, part of parent company Cedar Fair’s expansion plans for the area that also include a water park scheduled to open next summer.

Other properties losing space in the past year were the Hilton Irvine, down 3% to 17,732 square feet due to a change in the amount of space it leases on a long-term basis to one client; 41 Radisson Maingate Anaheim, which lost a little through the remodel of its president’s room; and No. 42 Ramada Santa Ana, which converted a third of its space to a restaurant.

No. 24 Sheraton Newport reported a decline of 1,000 square feet that it attributed to corrections made when it remeasured its space.

Meanwhile, though the Doubletree Guest Suites in Dana Point ranks No. 50 with 3,209 square feet, the hotel also leases the nearby 1,500-square-foot former Dana Point Yacht Club at Dana Point Harbor. The facility, known as Harbor Lights, can only be booked through the Doubletree Guest Suites, which provides shuttles between its site facing Doheny State Beach and the marina.

Just shy of making the cut this year was the Hotel Laguna in Laguna Beach, with 3,132 square feet of space and the new Doubletree Hotel Irvine Spectrum, with 3,130 square feet. The Doubletree, which opened in June, is concentrating its efforts on corporate business and has hosted events for local companies like Broadcom Corp., Lincoln-Mercury and Wonderware Corp. n

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