Oct. 23–So, the beach houses are booked and the lodges are full.
Now you can spend a week in the beautiful Midwestern locale of St. Louis, complete with gritty, legacy city charm and an unconventionally large stainless steel arch. You can't go swimming in the Mississippi River, but you can look at the coal barges.
We've made it, St. Louis. We're getting timeshares next to the Gateway Arch.
Timeshare company Diamond Resorts is buying six floors of the 29-story City Place Hotel — the former Crowne Plaza at 200 North Fourth Street — from Florida-based Inner Circle Investments.
"St. Louis is a new market for the industry and we are proud that Diamond Resorts will be the only company offering vacation ownership accommodations for the millions of families who explore St. Louis each year," Michael Flaskey, chief executive officer of Diamond Resorts, said in an announcement.
Six floors of the existing 440-room City Place Hotel will be "repositioned as luxury apartments, hotel rooms and vacation ownership units," a project Las Vegas-based Diamond Resorts said should be complete by mid-2020.
When it opened in the mid 1960s, the 29-story hotel was part of the three-tower Mansion House apartment complex near the St. Louis riverfront. It was converted to a Holiday Inn in 1974 before picking up the Radisson banner in 1998. The southernmost tower became a Crowne Plaza hotel in December 2006.
The Crowne Plaza flag stopped flying at the property after its 2015 sale, with the new owners saying they planned to add apartments to the 1960s-era tower originally built as downtown residences. It hasn't returned to a major hotel flag, instead operating under the independent City Place brand. It also maintained the 440-hotel room count, according to its website.
Diamond Resorts says the City Place tower will become one of its "flagship urban destinations" once the redesign is complete.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but Diamond Resorts did refer to the transaction as "capital efficient."
Inner Circle also owns the St. Louis City Center Hotel at 14th and Spruce streets, which was recently rebranded as a Red Lion Hotel.
