Room count
Charleston hotel room inventory by geographic area:
North Charleston: 7,179
Peninsula: 3,731
Mt. Pleasant: 2,148
West Ashley: 1,569
Berkeley: 1,307
Beaches: 1,117
Dorchester: 724
Total: 17,775
Source: Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau
The first 133 keys for more than 500 new hotel rooms slated for Mount Pleasant will be handed out Friday.
On the horizon
Other Mount Pleasant hotels on the way
Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina is adding 90 rooms to its 130-room waterfront hotel at Patriots Point.
A 110-room Marriott-brand SpringHill Suites is being built on Magrath Darby Boulevard.
A 100-room Staybridge Suites, an extended-stay lodging, is expected to rise at 251 Johnnie Dodds Blvd.
Jupiter Holdings plans to build a 100-room, 3- to 4-story Holiday Inn Express on Stockade Lane, north of the Isle of Palms Connector.
That’s when the new nearly $20 million Hilton Garden Inn at 300 Wingo Way opens at the foot of the Ravenel Bridge, Encore Lodging developer and co-owner David Tart said.
After about 17 months of construction, the six-story lodging on 2.75 acres will register its first guests, in time for the annual Cooper River Bridge Run.
“It’s time to start making some money,” Tart said.
The new Hilton Garden Inn is the first new one to rise in a cluster of proposed hotels at Mount Pleasant’s doorway. Two others, about 100 rooms each, are slated just across Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, while another is expanding at Patriots Point. A fourth is projected just beyond the Isle of Palms connector.
They all follow the opening last fall of the 119-room Wyndham Garden hotel on Stuart Engals Boulevard off the end of Interstate 526. It replaced the rundown Fort Moultrie Motel, which had been shuttered for several years.
Occupancy rates
The East Cooper hotel boom so far has had little effect on occupancy rates.
For the first two months of the year, occupancy levels for Mount Pleasant hotels were up 3.3 percent to 54.9 percent, according to Perrin Lawson with the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.
That’s considered a healthy level for the stark winter months, he said.
Mount Pleasant has nearly 2,150 hotel rooms. While the new hotel will have some impact on occupancy rates as it ramps up, the overall effect should not be too pronounced, Lawson said.
“In the long term, it will be a great benefit,” he said.
The additional 90 rooms being added at the Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina at Patriots Point should be finished later this year, while the two hotels planned near the new Hilton probably won’t be finished until next year at the earliest.
Time will tell what effect the additional rooms will have on the overall Mount Pleasant hotel market, Lawson said.
Charleston’s tourism draw remains strong as the county’s overall occupancy rate for the first two months of the year was 62.5 percent, up 0.1 percent over the same period last year, according to the CVB. Room nights sold were up 2.5 percent for the start of the year, Lawson said.
For each of the past few years, the Charleston region has averaged better than 70 percent occupancy, a key benchmark for a healthy hotel market and a reason for the spurt of hotel growth.
Another 394 rooms will be added in downtown Charleston this year as the Midtown project brings two Hyatt brands, and The Spectator and the Grand Bohemian welcome guests.
Another sign of a healthy market is the average daily room rate.
For the first two months of the year, the average daily room rate for the Charleston market came in at about $126, up 8 percent over last year, Lawson said.
At the Hilton
Room rates for the new Hilton Garden Inn in Mount Pleasant will range from $120 to $250, depending on the season, said Tart, the co-owner.
With seven suites, the hotel also has an outdoor pool and Garden Grille Bar that will serve breakfast, dinner and local craft beer.
The new lodging includes 2,500 square feet of indoor meeting space and a similar amount of outside space on an elevated patio with a fire pit.
“We certainly believe it brings one of the best midscale select hotels to Mount Pleasant with one of the strongest brands in the world,” Tart said.
Lawson agreed. “It’s a nice product, and it’s in a great location.”
The hotel will employ 25 to 30 workers and is almost fully staffed.
“We went to great effort to hire local industry employees with some experience,” Tart said. “We have an exceptional management team in place. The quality of the product makes it easy to attract the right kind of talent.”
The site, surrounded by inns, includes a 1-acre restaurant parcel on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard. No restaurant is imminent, but the land and parking spaces are set aside for a future sit-down, casual-type restaurant, Tart said. “It won’t be fast food,” he said.
The new hotel is next to a Holiday Inn Express, Clarion Inn and Extended Stay.
The developer demolished the two-story Masters Inn in July 2013 to erect the new Hilton Garden Inn.
“We worked hard to create a hotel that fits in with the Charleston and Mount Pleasant architectural surroundings,” Tart said. “We have an extremely spacious lobby with 25-foot ceilings and the latest in audio-visual technology.”
West Ashley-based Encore Lodging, in partnership with Old Tabby Ventures, also owns a 112-room Hampton Inn in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., and is developing a 90-room, as-yet-unnamed boutique hotel in Asheville.
Tart’s business partner in Encore Lodging is David Swentor. The Wingo Way property is owned by OTV Masters LLC, which bought the site for $3.75 million in July 2011.
OTV Masters is comprised of Old Tabby Ventures and The Howard Co., both based in Charleston.
Reach Warren L. Wise at 937-5524 or twitter.com/warrenlancewise.
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