The new Hampton Inn Hotel and Suites opened quietly last Friday at 1 p.m., with guests paying $229 to check in and spend the night in the attractive, L-shaped building on 6th Avenue across from Treasure Coast Plaza.
Keith Kite, who developed the 3-story, 90-room property, originally hoped to have the hotel open by last Christmas to catch Vero’s seasonal wave of winter visitors. Though he missed the bulk of the season, he says he is relieved to have the hotel open and excited by the exceptionally busy winter just past, which he believes bodes well for the hotel’s future occupancy.
“The first three months of the year have been phenomenal, and with the Surf Club Hotel closing last month, it creates even greater demand for beds in Vero Beach,” said Kite, managing partner of Vero Beach Hotel Group, the partnership that owns the hotel.
Designed by Memphis-based LLW Architects, the 61,000-square-foot hotel has “a modern Vero Beach look with a Mizner touch,” according to Kite. It was built by Proctor construction over a period of 13 months.
“The groundbreaking was in March 2014,” says Kite, who with his partners put in years of number crunching, site planning and permitting prior to construction, using sophisticated data collection and analysis to determine likely occupancy rates for the property.
Kite has pursued a project at the 6th Ave. site since 2007, when he acquired the roughly triangular parcel bordered on the south by a curving section of westbound State Road 60 and on the north by 20th Place.
He wasn’t set on building a hotel when he bought the 2.5-acre property, but he was confident that, given the location adjacent to Miracle Mile, some type of commercial or mixed use development would be successful there.
“When we found out Hampton wanted to put a hotel in Vero, we focused on that and applied for the franchise license,” Kite says. “They are a great group to work with, very entrepreneurial, but they are protective of their brand. You have to qualify and have experience to do business with them.”
Kite and his associates already own eight hotels, including three Hampton Inns and the award-winning Springhill Suites property on Indian River Boulevard, which was named Hotel of the Year for its brand by Marriott in 2011, so the experience box was easy to check.
Still, the project was not cakewalk. After a first round of site and demographic analysis in 2010, Kite and his associates put the hotel on hold because they were not confident it would be successful.
Fast forward to 2013 and conditions had improved enough to trigger a green light.
Increased housing starts, a new five-year lease for Peter O’Malley’s group at Historic Dodger Town that demonstrated the county’s commitment to a major tourism draw, growth at Indian River Medical Center, a burgeoning trade in small group meetings and destination weddings and strong occupancy at his Springhill Suites property on Indian River Blvd. gave Kite confidence the timing is was right for a substantial new hotel in Vero Beach.
“All those things, along with favorable interest rates and the fact that banks are beginning to lend again, gave us the window we needed,” he said at the time.
Kite says his Hampton Inn is the first new hotel built in Vero in four years. It contains 30 king rooms, 30 double queen rooms and 30 two-room suites. All rooms have free wi-fi access, 42-inch flat screen TVs, refrigerators and microwaves. The hotel has an outdoor swimming pool and a fitness center and provides free breakfast.
Hampton Inn is part of the Hilton Worldwide hotel group and Kite says guest traffic flowing through that network will fill an average of 40 percent of the rooms in his new property on a daily basis before the first tourist from Tampa or Toledo turns off U.S. 1 and checks in.
The Hampton Inn and Suites brand is highly regarded in the hospitality field and business world in general. It was ranked by Entrepreneur Magazine as the best franchise in the nation in 2011, 2012 and 2013. “That is not just the top hotel franchise,” Kite says. “It is the top franchise of any kind.”
Entreprenuer Magazine ranked it the second-best U.S franchise in 2014
Kite says the hotel opened with 18 fulltime employees, a number he expects will fluctuate seasonally between 14 and 24. Brenda Celano is the general manager.
There will be an official opening ceremony on April 21 and an open house on June 3.
