July 06–The Eugene Airport soon will be looking for a developer to build and operate a three- or four-star hotel on land the airport owns at the corner of Awbrey Lane and Highway 99.
Airport officials hope this month to issue a request for proposals for a hotel on a 22-acre grassy triangular parcel just south of Fiddler’s Green golf course.
“We’ve wanted to have an airport hotel for quite a while,” Deputy Airport Director Cathryn Stephens said. “It’s something we have inquiries about.”
“You have to travel downtown or to Valley River Center or to the Gateway area (in Springfield), and that’s typically what people do now,” Stephens said.
Five-star hotels offer the highest level of accommodation and service. Examples of four-star chains include Hyatt and Marriott. Three-star chains typically would include Holiday Inn and Hilton.
The airport doesn’t have a specific opening date in mind, Stephens said.
“I could tell you we could use it today if we had it,” she said.
The airport also isn’t specifying how big the hotel should be.
“We’re not in the hotel business,” Stephens said. “That is for the experts to say, ‘Here is the demand, and we think it could support X number of rooms.'”
The airport does want a hotel with a wide range of amenities, including a full-service restaurant, at least 2,000 square feet of meeting space, meeting room and in-room Internet access, an onsite business center, a spa and fitness center, shuttle service to and from the airport and landscaped grounds, according to the preliminary request for proposal, or RFP.
“We want it to be a real asset to our airport property and also to our community,” Stephens said.
The request for proposal doesn’t address whether other retail could accompany the hotel.
“Knowing the parcel of land could probably hold some other things, … if we hear of interest in another type of business we could take a look at that and potentially issue an RFP for that,” Stephens said.
The airport wants to work with a national brand hotel that generated at least $500,000 in gross sales a year for three of the past five years, according to the preliminary request for proposal.
The hotel operator would lease the land from the airport and pay a monthly concession fee, which would inch up from 4 percent of annual gross revenue in the first year to 8 percent of annual gross revenue for the last 10 years of the 30-year lease, with an option to pay 9 percent of annual gross revenue during an additional 10 years, she said.
“This revenue would allow us to lower our airline rates, which will assist us in attracting service, Airport Director Tim Doll recently wrote in an airport update to Eugene’s public works director. Doll was in Ireland and unavailable for comment on Friday.
Airport officials had drafted a preliminary RFP for a hotel back in 2007, Stephens said.
“When the recession hit, we didn’t think we’d get the responses for the RFP that we would have liked, so we shelved it for a few years.”
Now airport officials believe the timing is right for upscale accommodations near the airport.
“We’ve added a couple new airlines,” Stephens said. “We’ve had two record years. We just had a record May over record May, so we know the demand is there.
“In addition, beyond the airport demand we have the state mental hospital and prison being built up the road in Junction City,” she said.
Six airlines now serve the Eugene airport. Last year, a record 809,457 paying passengers traveled through the airport, up 3.74 percent from 2011. The airport is on track for another record year, with passenger counts for the first five months of 2013 up 3.2 percent from the same period last year.
As more feasibility work is done on the hotel project, the level of demand will come into clearer focus, said Kari Westlund, CEO of Travel Lane County.
“A developer is going to look over that project pretty carefully because they’ll have to maintain enough business year-round to make that (project work),” she said.
A lot has changed near the airport — including the new proposed developments — since the last feasibility work on an airport hotel was completed more than a decade ago, Westlund said.
A hotel in that area could provide housing support for people involved in constructing the mental hospital in Junction City, accommodations for people visiting relatives in the hospital, and lodging for suppliers and vendors who might want to stay near the facility, she said.
The Oregon Horse Center on nearby Prairie Road “generates some great events, so that proximity will be handy,” Westlund said.
And the airport itself has experienced “phenomenal growth,” she said.
The airport has “done a great job” attracting air travelers in the region to fly out of Eugene instead of Portland, Westlund said. Hotel lodging, especially for people traveling to Eugene to catch early morning flights, might help the airport capture even more of that business, she said.
On Friday, for example, there were six flights out of Eugene before 10 a.m., half of which left before 6 a.m.
Coming on the heels of last month’s announcement that Springfield has agreed to sell land in Glenwood to a private developer for a $7 million hotel there, “We certainly have seen some good strength overall in the hotel sector over the last few months,” Westlund said.
The Eugene-Springfield area has close to 4,000 hotel rooms, and Lane County overall has about 5,000, she said.
The parcel near the airport is part of the airport overlay zone.
“That land is good to go and has utilities to it,” Stephens said.
“It’ll be nice to have a hotel on this end of town of this quality,” she said. “I think it will benefit not just the airport patrons but the general community and on up into Junction City as well.”
