New owner of Salt Lake City’s Shilo Inn will make it a Holiday Inn
Facelift » Decades-old hotel to receive $10 million overhaul to its 200 rooms, exterior.
By TONY SEMERAD | The Salt Lake Tribune
Downtown Salt Lake City’s iconic Shilo Inn has been sold and its new Cedar City-based owners are promising to renovate the aging hotel and relaunch it as a Holiday Inn.
The neon-lined hotel, at 206 S. West Temple next to the Salt Palace Convention Center, will see a major overhaul of its 200 guest rooms, lobby and common areas as well as its exterior, said Jim Burgess, president of the privately held Burgess Investment Group, which bought the site late last week.
The Shilo Inn will get a complete facelift — including removal of its glaring red neon features.
"It’ll look like a new hotel when it’s done," Jim Burgess said. "The goal is for no-one to know it’s a conversion."
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57440124-78/inn-hotel-burgess-shilo.html.csp
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. Phx has more visitors, but only because we count snowbirds in that number; however, in recent polls of 1st time visitors, they show a rather high level of dissatisfaction and disappointment with Phx. Maricopa county has noticed a sharp decrease in numbers of visitors over the past 5 years beyond what the last recession caused. The number of visitors has not recovered the way we thought it would've. The biggest complaints are that Phx is rather boring unless you play golf and that what the tourists really want to see - Sedona and the Grand Canyon - are far away. The snowbirds we are counting are also showing signs of dissastisfaction with Phx. The baby boomers who are starting to show up aren't satisfied with shuffle board, golf, ceremonial daily trips to Scottsdale and quilting bees like the previous generation. They want to live in the regular part of town and not in the trailer parks and retirement centers of Sun City and East Mesa. They also complain about our bad air day in and day out all year (our brown cloud is here almost everyday of the year; whereas, at least SLC just has bad Januaries and it then clears out a bit). We have several big hotels, but they are not filling up the way they used to, even in winter. As for foreign visitors, we've only seen an increase of Canadians coming, and only as snowbirds. European and Asian tourists have dropped significantly. We think part of that is that they are now flying into Las Vegas and then touring the national parks to the north instead of coming here to do the same. Our convention hotel is under utilized because no one wants to have conventions here between April and October. If we don't count snowbirds, SLC receives far more visitors than Phx. We are going to have to rethink things down here if we want to keep attracting tourists and snowbirds.
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