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HOSPITALITY & TOURISM
Sanctuary opening highlights tourism and hospitality year
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
The August 2004 opening of The Sanctuary at Kiawah Island, a 255-room oceanfront luxury hotel whose nightly rates range from $275 to $4,500, reportedly drew about 150 business leaders, politicians and tourism professionals, plus more than 2,500 others to the hotel’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“It may have been the biggest hotel opening in the U.S. in several years,” says Prem Devadas, the hotel’s manager.
Kiawah Island Golf Resort, which owns the $125 million hotel, has set luxuriously lofty goals for The Sanctuary—namely, a five-diamond AAA rating and a five-star Mobile rating within the hotel’s first two years. Hailed as one of South Carolina’s shiniest tourism gems, the Sanctuary is expected to lure visitors the Palmetto State has never before attracted. That’s why the hotel is expected to generate an annual economic impact of more than $40 million.
Food front
Trident Technical College made significant headway with the construction of its 77,000-square-foot Culinary and Hospitality Training Center, scheduled to open in fall 2005, a year before culinary school Johnson & Wales University leaves Charleston for Charlotte.
“We’ll fill the Johnson & Wales void in the long term,” says Michael Saboe, coordinator of TTC’s hospitality, tourism and culinary arts program.
Located on TTC’s main campus in North Charleston, the Culinary and Hospitality Training Center will feature a huge, open, full-service production kitchen where students prepare meals for the adjoining 100-seat dining room—a restaurant that will be open to the public and be operated entirely by students. On the other side of the dining room will be two industry-standard teaching kitchens where students receive training in basic culinary skills.
The new training center and TTC’s Palmer Campus together will be able to train up to 1,000 students each year.
In August, Wando High School in Mount Pleasant launched the first culinary arts program in the school’s history. The curriculum is a ProStart program. Designed by the National Restaurant Association’s Educational Foundation, ProStart is a two-year school-to-career initiative in which students work in local restaurants in addition to attending classes. Students completing the program receive a certificate from the NRA, which opens doors to culinary careers.
Plans got underway in 2004 for a Charleston food and wine festival similar to those in Aspen, Colo., and Austin, Texas. Both festivals bring about 5,000 people to their respective regions for seminars, tastings and opportunities to rub elbows with the world’s dining elite.
“I was approached by Marc Collins of Circa 1886 about doing this and thought it was a fabulous idea,” says proposed festival’s chairperson Angel Postell of Home Team Communications. Postell considers Charleston “an ideal setting for such an event.”
Charleston’s festival is slated to begin in 2006.
Plans to start a Charleston chapter of the Louisville, Ky.-based American Institute of Wine and Food, a nonprofit organization whose mission, according to its web site, is to “enhance quality of life through education about what we eat and drink,” also got underway in 2004.
Other happenings
At this writing, Charleston’s cruise ship traffic for 2004 has yet to be tallied but is expected to rival 2003: 47 vessels that brought 90,680 passengers, according to J. Corwin Pharr, director of government relations at the Maritime Association. The Holy City is expected to see similar numbers in 2005.
Early in 2004, the Palmetto Bowl, a Charleston-based college football contest proposed by national sports television and radio network ESPN, seemed to be in the works for a December 2005 debut. The game, originally slated for The Citadel’s Johnson Hagood Stadium, would generate an estimated economic impact of more than $9.7 million, according to the Charleston Metro Sports Council. However, in July officials from the Sports Council and ESPN announced there would be no Palmetto Bowl in Charleston in 2005, thanks largely to the Confederate flag controversy and the lack of a suitable stadium. Neither would a proposed football game between historically black colleges be played in 2005.
Still, it’s possible a college bowl game could come to Charleston in 2006 or later. ESPN says it still plans to have an office in Charleston. The Citadel is raising money for a new stadium to accommodate such an event.
Overall, experts believe 2005 will be a growth year for the Lowcountry’s $4.5 billion-a-year hospitality and tourism industry. The region’s hotels especially are primed to do more business, says Tripp Hayes, president of the Greater Charleston Hotel and Motel Association.
“Group bookings are getting bigger, and we can expect to see growth in occupancy and in room rates,” Hayes points out. He adds that tour buses also should enjoy more business.
Hayes attributes the growth primarily to low airfare travel into Charleston. “Independence Air has opened up a lot of business for us,” he says, noting that the affordability has brought more bookings from meeting planners.
Additionally, visitors from Charlotte and Atlanta—the two prime targets of the Lowcountry’s tourism marketing campaign—continue to drive to the Charleston area despite high gasoline prices, Hayes notes.
On the restaurant side, big bottles will make their South Carolina alcoholic debut in the middle of 2005, thanks to the state Legislature overturning the mini-bottle law. This means more casual-style national-chain eateries will be coming to town, says restaurant broker Johnny Bevon of commercial real estate firm barkleyfraser.com.
Bevon adds that availability of restaurant space for national chains is no problem in the restaurant-heavy Lowcountry. “These restaurants have deep pockets, and space will be made somehow, somewhere.”
Dennis Quick covers hospitality and tourism for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@crbj.com
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