Hotels Cancelling

Geez, I hope this is not widespread but I have heard reports of at least one hotel in Carbondale cancelling room reservations 3 days before the Eclipse. These were reservations mad a year to a year and half ago when rooms were going for $90 a night. Now that rooms are renting for $400 a night for the eclipse, rooms reserved by families over a year ago are getting canceled and those people are either having to scramble to book rooms at much higher prices or cancelling their trip altogether. 

I figure there will be some lawsuits filed as cancelling reserved rooms without a good reason just to rebook at a higher price is, as far as I know, illegal.

Eclipse Campsites

 The cityis offering short term campsites in Evergreen Park for the weekend of the Eclipse.  Prices range from $500 to $800 for the period, which seems a bit steep but I remember the asking prices for hotel rooms during the eclipse weekend last time and I see at least one local hotel asking $700 a night for rooms that weekend.

Eclipse Hotel Pricing

Still a few hotel rooms available for the Great American Eclipse in Carbondale. Unfortunately, they start at $250 per night and run up to $499 per night with a three night minimum.  Will certainly be interesting to see if we have any rooms left come the Eclipse and what they prices are at the time of the event.

Hampton Inn Open House

In case you are free this Thursday, the Hampton Inn on the east side of Carbondale will host an open house from 4 to 6 p.m. to show off their newly renovated facilities and guest rooms.

TIF Agreement with Hotel

Looks as if construction on the downtown Hilton will start about April 1 (hope that is not symbolic of anything), now that TIF financing is in place. From my reading of the article, the developer can realize a maximum of $1,850,000 in TIF reimbursements, which isn't too bad. My problem with TIFs in general is that, if this is a good spot for a business to locate, there is no need for any tax incentives for the building and the city is just giving up money that could be spent on other projects.

Intermodal Transport Hub Follow-up

An email I received indicates that the proposed plan for the graded area north of the Amtrak station is as a parking lot to replace the one lost when the new Hilton hotel gets built on the parking area just south of P. K.s. Later, when the city finds funding for the proposed intermodal complex, the parking area gets incorporated into it.

Convention Hotel

Assuming it gets built, the new Hyatt will be a nice addition to downtown but what Carbondale could really use is a hotel with convention facilities. We have not had one with enough space to host a convention since the old Holiday Inn on East Main was shuttered several years ago for all sorts of violations. The Holiday Inn out by Reeds Station Road does have some meeting space but not nearly enough to host a convention of any reasonable size. I looked at it several years ago for an event I was hosted that I expected to draw about 150 to 200 people and could not see any way to fit that number into what the Holiday Inn had available.

Now Carbondale does have plenty of meeting space, both at the Civic Center and at SIUC, but neither has a hotel attached. People attending multi-day events at either have to take lodging elsewhere and arrange for transportation to the facility, not a great selling point when trying to pitch Carbondale as a location to host a large event over multiple days. Like anyone else convention attendees want to travel as little as possible from where they are staying to the meeting facility and Carbondale really does not have a facility to handle such an event.

Hotel

Still wondering about the proposal to put what appears a lower end Hilton downtown next to PKs. Granted, it would be incredibly convenient for those arriving via Amtrak but the proposed area certainly does not appear large enough for both a modern hotel and parking for those who want to drive in from out of town.

Plus PKs and surrounding businesses lose convenient public parking which really fills up in the evening. Will the public be able to access the parking space for the hotel or will the hotel rely on the soon to be inconvenient parking in downtown?

Hotel

City council approved sale of the parking lot and adjacent property at 200 West Elm last night for development of an 85 room Hilton Home 2 hotel. This is located just south of PK's and across the street from the Amtrak station. There has been talk of a hotel going into this location for about 2 years, so nice to see something happening on that front. Two major concerns though:

Location:  The location is rather a tight squeeze between the alley running alongside PKs and West Elm. With 4-5 stories and 85 rooms going in, I can see congestion as a problem. Also, locating next to PKs may be fine for the 200+ musicians Curtis Connoly mentions in the article that lodge at the hotels on the east side currently, but what about families coming to SIUC and people coming to take advantage of the SIH medical facilities?

Parking:  This is the bugaboo that devils any large development coming into downtown. The area already lost a good chunk of parking space to the Carbondale Flats/Evolve complex and while the city will expand and upgrade parking and this development will remove even more. How will this affect business in that area of S. Illinois?

Hotel Rooms Filled

Not sure what is going on in town this weekend. No football game and the fall colors are nowhere near their peak, but, according to the Convention and Tourism Bureau, every hotel room in the three hotels out by Reed Station Road is booked for Saturday night and there are only a few remaining rooms to be had for Friday night. Halloween isn't for a couple of more weeks and I haven't heard anything about Unofficial Halloween this year so doubt that is it.

Downtown Hotel

While a hotel, or even a motel, downtown would be quite nice, where would one go?

The original plan for the Student Center called for attaching a hotel, staffed by hospitality students, to the west side of the building. Doing that now, of course, would require bulldozing large sections of Thompson Woods, which I doubt the administration would approve.

A few years ago, a developer proposed putting a hotel on the empty space just south of PK's. Nothing ever happened with that which is just as well, since I cannot see people coming in visiting SIUC or Memorial Hospital particularly enjoying the view of the Strip from their hotel windows.

Hampton Inn Bankruptcy

A blog reader pointed out a legal notice on page 3D of the May 24 Southern, announcing that Reed Lodging LLC was filing a complaint for foreclosure against CSP Carbondale Hotel Partners on the property identified as Lot 5 Reed Station Crossing, better known as the Hampton Inn.

I've been wondering about the number of hotels going up in the Reed Station Crossing area.  Three have gone up in the last 6 years, while the population of Carbondale has stayed roughly the same.  Granted, people living in the community aren't the ones using the hotels, but still, I would expect a growth in the population correlating with the number of hotels built.  I have heard comments for several years that one reason Carbondale could not attract larger sports events was the lack of hotel rooms for attendees, but not that they are there, it doesn't appear they are getting filled as tax revenue generated by the hotels has declined approximately 10% over the last fiscal year, compared to 2011.

American's Best Inn Shut Down

The city has shut down the America's Best Inn on the east side of town for violations involving leaky pipes and insect infestations. There's a hearing on Sept. 8th for the owners to show they have fixed the problems. My bet is, we'll see a number of complaints, inspections, closures and re-openings for several years, until the building deteriorates beyond the point of repair, much like the Horizon Inn.

Update: Here're the reviews DaveX refers to in the comments.

Royal Plaza Inn

Interesting side story arising from the Oluwatofunmi Kaiyewu story. Kaiyewu had been a medical student at Windsor University Medical School at St. Kitts in the West Indies. Students who fail courses at the main campus are sent to Royal USMLE courses taught at contract schools in the US to retake those classes. One of these courses is taught at 2400 West Main St. in Carbondale, which coicidentally is the Royal Plaza Inn. According to this, the Royal Plaza no longer rents rooms to the public but serves solely as a dormitory for students from Windsor and is either an extremely fine hotel or slowly falling apart.