For the second straight year, Orange County was home to the largest new hotel to open in California, thanks to the debut of the 613-room Westin Anaheim Resort. Yet despite its opening—the Westin counts nearly 50,000 square feet of meeting space—and other recently built hotels that cater to large events and meetings in the area, OC’s base of hotel meeting room space only saw a modest 0.5% growth over the past six months.
The Business Journal’s annual hotel meeting rooms list counts 1.9 million square feet of area meeting space, with 739 meeting rooms in total.
Both numbers are similar to the Business Journal’s list published in August.
Chalk up the modest growth to a pair of high-profile departures from the list, rather than a retrenching in the industry due to the pandemic.
Irvine Co.’s Hotel Irvine and Fashion Island Hotel Newport Beach both dropped off the list after being shuttered for over a year. The duo in total counted about 72,000 square feet of meeting space (see story, page 22).
Top Unchanged
Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel continues as the county’s largest for meeting space, with 215,796 square feet, followed by No. 2 Hilton Anaheim, with 150,000 square feet, and the No. 3 Anaheim Marriott, with 129,529 square feet.
Altogether, these three hotels in the city’s resort area have nearly half a million square feet, about a quarter of all the meeting space in Orange County.
Thirty-two of the 35 hotels reported no change in square footage.
Orange County in 2021 opened seven hotels with 1,333 rooms, a 4.8% room count decrease from the 1,401 rooms in seven hotels in 2020, according to Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group. The Westin was the largest of the seven and tops for all hotels in the state last year, it said.
Optimism in Industry
Execs tell the Business Journal that inquiries in booking meeting space has been picking up, despite omicron issues of late.
“Phones have been ringing nonstop,” according to Nicholas Price, general manager at the new Westin Anaheim Resort. The calls are signaling “a return to what we knew as hospitality a few years ago. [The hotel is] on the right trajectory to get there.”
The four-diamond resort ranks No. 12 this year with 47,542 square feet of total space and 23 meeting rooms as of this month. It was one of four Anaheim hotel openings in 2021.
With its one-year anniversary coming up in June, the Westin has kept its doors open, with business slowly returning through social bookings and pushed back conventions.
“We stayed true to what the guest experience should be, having all our services open [and] all of our outlets,” GM Price said.
Securing Solutions
With the omicron variant causing more havoc in the travel industry, the goal of stabilizing the hospitality industry has hotels trying to keep its events business from stalling.
Marketing organization Visit Anaheim has revamped its company’s sales team to dedicate more time to the strategy of securing meetings and keeping the local community booked and busy.
“A lot of cancellations were pushed to future dates so now we’re trying to fill some of those holes that were left,” Chief Executive Jay Burress told the Business Journal.
Burress also noted the distinct change in booking windows, some going from five years out to 24 months.
The upcoming months are full of business from associations and corporations all over California, the city’s top market, he said.
And with recent higher end additions such as the Westin Anaheim and JW Marriott Anaheim Resort, the largest hotel to open in the state in 2020, Burress is thankful for “a classification of hotels we were lacking in. They help make the city shine as a destination and that’s been valuable for us moving forward.”
Summer promises visitors for the seasonal festivals at the Disneyland Resort and rescheduled meetings at the Anaheim Convention Center.
Notables
• A new entrant on the list is No. 30 The Inn at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, which has 24,840 square feet. Its largest meeting room sits at 3,000 square feet.
• No. 4 Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa transformed an unused bar and restaurant to a new 2,000-square-foot room called the Cove.
• New locations on tap include the Element by Westin in June. It’s one among Orange County’s 66 hotels with 12,098 rooms in planning, according to Atlas Hospitality.
