Hotel Lodging News

ALBUQUERQUE, NM (September 3, 2007) - An extended-stay hotel with 110 suites is going up near the Albuquerque International Sunport, expanding both the supply and variety of places to stay in the area.

Longview, Texas-based Lodging Host Hotel Corp. plans to open the four-story, 82,000-square-foot Residence Inn by Marriott at 2301 International SE in June 2008, said president Kevin Hilchey.When all of the costs are added up, the hotel will be a roughly $14 million project, he said. Once in operation, the hotel will employ a full- and part-time staff of 40, almost all of whom will be hired locally.

“We’ve done some consulting work at other hotels in the Albuquerque market, but this is our first with an ownership (stake),” Hilchey said.  Lodging Host chose the just over three-acre site to a large degree because of its proximity to the Sunport.

“Airports are a feeder for the hospitality industry,” Hilchey saied. “If you take out the blip after 9/11, air traffic counts have been going up steadily all over the country for years.”    

About 6.5 billion airline passengers passed through the Sunport in 2006. As of July, the passenger count was up 4.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the city of Albuquerque.

Typical customers will fly in and out of the airport and stay 15 days or more to do business at the nearby University of New Mexico, Lovelace and Presbyterian hospitals, Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Laboratories, he said.

Another source of extended-stay customers is households in the process of relocating to or from Albuquerque, he said.

The Residence Inn brand has nearly 500 hotels across the country. In Albuquerque, there are two Residence Inns— one each in the North I-25 corridor and Midtown area under different ownership.

The decision to pursue plans for a Residence Inn near the Sunport was based in part on the belief that the airport area was underserved by extended-stay hotels, Hilchey said.

With construction either imminent or under way on two other extended-stay brand hotels in the area, that’s not as true as it once was, he acknowledged.

Over the past 10 years or so, about a dozen hotels have been built near the airport. More are in the works.

Originally a hotel management company, Lodging Host has transitioned in the past six years to having at least a partial ownership stake in its hotel properties. Its investment partners in the airport project are three New Mexico-based family trusts, Hilchey said.

By Richard Metcalf of the Albuquerque Journal