On the heels of another bustling year of tourism and economic development, plans for a new large hotel and residential subdivision have surfaced in Whitefish.
The city’s planning and building department received a preliminary application for a new three-story, 111-room hotel off U.S. Highway 93 south of the Whitefish Mountain Mall. The tentative plan is for a TownePlace Suites by Marriott, an extended-stay hotel that offers studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom suites with full kitchens and separate living and sleeping areas.
The proposed 63,000-square-foot hotel would sit south of the pond near the mall and require a new road to be built east from U.S. 93 to Whitefish Avenue. The lot is currently empty and zoned as a secondary business district, which requires a conditional use permit for buildings greater than 15,000 square feet.
Wendy Compton-Ring, the city’s senior planner, said the city’s Architectural Review Committee will review the preliminary proposal and once a land-use permit is submitted the project will go before the planning board and eventually the city council.
The proposed hotel would sit adjacent to a new 95-unit residential subdivision that is also tentatively planned for across the street to the south.
City planners have received a preliminary application for a large subdivision near Whitefish River. The subdivision plans show 13 single-family residential lots, two five-plex buildings, a 24-unit, three-story apartment complex and two six-unit townhouses. A second phase of the development shows a mixed-use building with 36 units along U.S. 93. The subdivision would require the extension of Whitefish Avenue from north to south behind Les Schwab Tire Center.
The city’s planning board and council will review the proposal in the coming months.
The hotel project is the latest lodging addition in the Flathead Valley, which is already gaining 325 new rooms this year. Whitefish has two new hotels opening in 2016. The Firebrand Hotel, under construction on Second Street and Spokane Avenue in downtown, will add 86 rooms atop a 15,000-square-foot footprint. The 20,000-square-foot Hampton Inn, just south of the proposed Marriott, plans to open its 76-room, three-story hotel this spring.
In Columbia Falls, the Cedar Creek Lodge will be 25,000 square feet with 64 rooms and a 3,000-square-foot convention center. It is slated to open in summer. In Kalispell, a four-story, 101-room Marriott Springhill Suites is under construction near Kidsports Complex with plans to open this summer.
The developments are emerging as Montana and the Flathead Valley continue to grow as a tourist destination. An estimated 11.7 million people visited Montana in 2015, an 8 percent increase over the previous year, according to preliminary data compiled by the Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research at the University of Montana.
In Whitefish, the bed tax collections show 2015 was one of the best years on record in terms of lodging. From January through September, a total of $710,071 was collected, the third highest amount on record since the tax on lodging prices began in 1987. The annual record amount ($807,446) came in 2014 and the second highest total ($771,001) was in 2013, an amount that could be surpassed when the final three months of 2015 are tallied.
Perhaps even more telling, the amount of lodging collections from only July through September in 2015 was larger than the town’s total annual collections from 1988 through 2004.
Kalispell also enjoyed one of its busiest years in terms of lodging last year and is expected to surpass $1 million in collections for the third year in a row.
Yet some are concerned that the sudden influx of new hotels could over saturate the market and tip the balance of lodging opportunities.
Montana hotels had an average occupancy rate of 58.9 percent last year, according to Smith Travel Research, an organization that tracks lodging data across the U.S.
Rhonda Fitzgerald, the owner of the Garden Wall Inn in downtown Whitefish who also serves on the ITRR research committee, said the community continues to try to bolster its visitation during the so-called shoulder seasons, when crowds tend to dissipate. Winter has made strides with more visitors but the current lineup of hotels still has plenty of available rooms outside of summer, Fitzgerald said.
“If you look at resort tax collections for Whitefish, July and August are strong months. June and September are OK. But the rest of the year is clearly not strong,” she said. “If you’re in business here, right now you’re working really hard for eight to nine months of the year to be profitable.”
Richard Hildner, a city councilor in Whitefish and member of the planning board, said he has some initial concerns about the community’s ballooning lodging opportunities without knowing much about the latest hotel proposal.
“I share the concern that we may be reaching that saturation point,” he said.