Affordable Hotels In Fort Lauderdale|"Toronto's Pearson Airport Lands A New Breed Of Hotel"

Source           :    calgaryherald.com/
Category       :    Affordable Hotels In Fort Lauderdale
By                :    RICK MCGINNIS
Posted By     :   Hotels In Fort Lauderdale

Affordable Hotels In Fort Lauderdale

The 427 roars past the old Valhalla Inn building, speeding travellers to and from the airport that was once the hotel's reason for existing. The building is empty and eerie. Terrance Jacobs lets me in through a side door; he's chief executive of TCL Asset Group, and his company has the contract to liquidate the hotel in a two-day auction next week, but even he admits he hates being here alone.There's always a hint of The Shining in any empty hotel, but it wasn't always like this for the Valhalla Inn, which opened in 1963, a labour of love by Etobicoke developer Edmund Peachey, who guessed that a Nordic-themed motor hotel near what was then called Malton airport would probably stand out from the crowd. And it did.

Way on the other side of Pearson's runways, on Derry Road just 750 yards from Brampton, the Radisson Plaza Mississauga is having its grand opening. There's no Viking longhouse lounge here-- the theme is Viennese rococo, all marble and gold, all meant to make this hotel stand out in today's crowd.Nick Kochhar is the general manager and VP of the Plaza, and he says that the business traveller they're targeting is a different beast from the onetime patrons of the Valhalla Inn's Mermaid Bar. They're more concerned with comfort than amusement, and put a premium on features like reliable broadband wifi, multiple flat panel TVs, a spacious bathroom, prompt laundry service and a really good bed.

"A few years ago you could see a distinct difference brand to brand," he tells me. "You'd see a difference between a mom-and-pop hotel and a Days Inn or a Holiday Inn, then a big jump in what you'd expect in a Hilton or a Radisson or a Four Seasons. Some of these brands barely had a TV in a room, not to mention a fridge or a coffee maker. Today, you can go to the smallest of these properties and these have become standard. The basic standard has stepped up."Out in airport hotel country, all that hasn't changed is their patrons' disinterest in being close to the action--and the traffic -- downtown. Once little more than motels, airport hotels soon tried to distinguish themselves by the quality of their facilities and entertainment, since patrons chose them mainly for their proximity to clients and suppliers. Today, business trips are more crowded, the expectations to produce more keen and technology has woven a more robust tether to employers and clients, so their room is their office, boardroom and bedroom.

When the Valhalla Inn was built, Scandinavian modern was the height of design fashion, but Peachey decided to go back a bit further, to the days of the longboat and the horned helmet, and so Mr. Jacobs lets me into conference rooms named after Norse gods like Freya and Odin, now filled with hundreds of auction lots of silverware and plastic plants, chafing dishes, plates and ice buckets -- 26 lots of eight, all emblazoned with the hotel's logo, which will survive in a sister hotel still doing business in Thunder Bay.A local heritage group has dibs on the bar in the Nordic Dining Room with its carved dragon prow, among other distinctive architectural elements, like the massive front door handles and the signage on the once-swinging Mermaid Bar. The deer that once roamed the landscaped courtyard are long gone, as are the girls in costume fish tails who once did shifts in the hotel pool, in front of the watertight windows behind the bar in the curved, azure-painted room downstairs. It's the sort of thing you associate with a hotel in Miami, not Toronto, even in the '60s, and in any case Mr. Jacobs tells me that this is the first time the windows to the pool have been exposed in years -- the owners had to cover them up with stained glass when patrons started getting naked in the pool, much to the amusement of Mermaid Bar patrons. It's an anecdote that typifies the first golden age of the airport hotel, when highways were giving way to airways, and the travelling salesman was transforming into the business traveller, albeit with the same need to let off a little steam with strangers far from home, glorying in a spell of blessed anonymity on the "airport strip," whose punning name referred as much to the peeler bars as the hotels.

But Peachey's closest onetime competitor, the Ramada Inn just up the highway, is also shuttered, and airport strip fixtures like the Regal Constellation are being demolished as the airport hotel and its clientele is evolving and moving further away from the city. At the new Radisson Plaza, Mr. Kochhar and the hotel's owners are aiming for at least a four diamond rating -- ambitious for a downtown hotel, never mind one located on a six-lane road full of rumbling diesel rigs, whose neighbours are warehouses and industrial parks. They're building ahead of a demand, he admits, but the logic is sound -- remote clusters of hotels have grown up to serve Markham's tech industries, for instance, and development around the old strip at Airport Road and Dixon has run out of space. "A hotel is something that is built ahead of time," Mr. Kochhar says. "In normal economic circumstances, when there is a demand people increase the capacity of manufacturing, whereas in tourism you have to make the availability first and then satisfy the demand."

Source:calgaryherald.com/travel/Pearson+Airport+lands+breed+hotel/2020083/story.html