Hotel to rise at Health Sciences
Other cities want hospital hotels too
By: Murray McNeill
RECESSION-WARY developers may be shelving hotel projects in other parts of the country, but it's full steam ahead for Canad Inns' proposed new hospital campus hotel.
"We're ready to go," Canad Inns president and chairman Leo Ledohowski said in an interview Tuesday. "It's going to tender at the end of this month and we hope to begin construction in June... and to be done by June 2010."
The Winnipeg-based hotel chain is building a $30-million-plus, 191-room, 18-storey hotel on the Health Sciences Centre campus next door to the new Siemens Institute for Advanced Medicine (SIAM) complex, under construction on William Avenue.
A report in Tuesday's Globe and Mail quoted hotel industry sources as saying almost all new hotel projects in the planning stages in Canada, and even some in the early stages of construction, are being shelved because of the challenges of obtaining financing during a global credit crunch and the uncertainty about the demand for hotel rooms from business and recreational travellers.
But Ledohowski said those aren't issues with Canada Inns' new project. Not only is financing in place, but its target customers are visiting medical personnel, patients and patients' families and friends, rather than regular business or recreational travellers.
When the Canad Inns Health Sciences Centre opens, it will be the only hotel in Canada on a hospital campus. And Ledohowski said that fact hasn't been lost on hospital officials elsewhere in the country.
He said he's fielded a number of inquiries from officials in cities like Calgary and Montreal.
"They're saying, 'What are you doing there? Sounds like something that might work here.' And I say, 'Let's wait and see how things work out,'" he added. "Right now, I want to get this one built."
He said the hotel will address both of those issues. Not only will it be a place where patients and their families can stay, but it will have three food-and-beverage venues -- a Mediterranean-styled bistro, a takeout restaurant and an Aaltos garden cafe.
Ledohowski first started mulling over the idea of building a hotel on a hospital campus about five years ago, while his mother was ill. He said it was difficult for family to properly visit her in a hospital room.
She also didn't care for hospital food, he said, and a hotel on campus would have given her another option.
"I think she would have lasted longer if we could have taken her something or taken her out to a restaurant nearby."
However, the idea didn't take root until 2006 when an HSC official approached him about building a hotel.
"We've been very keen to have Canad Inns build a hotel here," Dana Erickson, the hospital's vice-president and chief administrative officer, said Tuesday.
HSC will get a share of the hotel's profits, Erickson said.
murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca