The hotel, which cut close the Sept. 24 opening deadline, was a long time in the making. For months, a dirt parking lot housed trailers where sales and administration personnel were crammed together in noisy confusion. With the opening still weeks away, Director of Sales and Marketing Victoria Schlosser led the way through the incomplete high-rise, helping to fill in gaps that imagination and an illustration couldn’t put together. Here, an entryway with soaring ceilings; there, an elegant lobby with marble throughout; around the corner, restaurants and lounge areas with sunset views. “When it sets to the west, it will be directly behind the grand water feature,” she explains.

From the spacious, corner presidential suite to the king and double rooms decorated with mahogany furniture and rich fabrics, the guest rooms feature breathtaking views of Estero Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as golf courses and Pelican Landing high-rise condominiums south of the hotel. The resort has fielded “tons and tons” of requests for weddings, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs and other social events to be held on the lake pavilion and lawn or on the scenic outdoor terrace, Schlosser says.

In stark contrast to the manicured landscape that now surrounds it is the Hyatt’s neighbor, Week’s Fish Camp, one of the few remnants of Old Florida still found on the Lee County coast. Many of the hotels’ 450 rooms overlook the property, home of a once-thriving commercial fishing family, with its untidy collection of boats, vehicles and rustic homes.

The unkempt area was just one of the company’s headaches as it took on the project, whose January 2000 groundbreaking brought out a group of protesters. The most public controversy has been its fight with Pelican Landing residents over use of a private beach area, which eventually resulted in permitting hotel guests to use the area just south of Lover’s Key.

Hyatt management prefers to focus on the 18-story resort’s full slate of services, including a 19,000-square-foot, full-service European spa and 18-hole championship golf course adjacent to the property. They expect the new resort to rival five-star hotels in Florida and draw some of the customers who seek luxury accommodations.

But it’s the meeting space that makes the Hyatt a benchmark in Lee County, say some members of the business community. Schlosser rattles off facts about the facilities. The two ballrooms — 14,000 square feet and 7,400 square feet — boast 22-foot ceilings and can be divided into 13 breakout rooms. They include audio-visual amenities, high-speed Internet access, independent controls for lighting and sound, teleconferencing capabilities and access to a loading dock.

To some, the Hyatt, located on the Bonita Springs-Estero border, is only the most recent addition in the area’s gentrification. To others, it sets the tone for future development and promises an economic shot in the arm. “I think it’s going to have a significant impact on the Bonita and Estero market,” says Frank D’Alessandro, a commercial real estate broker with Grubb & Ellis|VIP-D’Alessandro. “What it will do is bring in a lot of high-end retail shoppers and, ultimately, it will bring in high-end home buyers.”

Bonita Springs Mayor Paul Pass envisions the Hyatt having a significant impact on the area’s economy, not only through retail sales, but also through real estate, employment, and by expanding the tax base. “Any time you bring in a world-class resort like that, you’re going to bring in a number of people who are probably going to spend a lot of money,” he says.

The business community also is looking for the Hyatt to help draw into Lee County the upscale development that took root in Naples years ago with the opening of The Ritz-Carlton and other resort hotels and has spread northward. “Basically, in Naples, they ran out of land. Tracts of land are very scarce, so it leapfrogged up into Bonita and Bonita is mostly spoken for,” D’Alessandro says, so “now it’s going into Estero, and after that it’s going to push east of the interstate and head inland.”

Having a destination resort in the Bonita Springs/Estero area is expected to have a tremendous impact on the community as a whole. More specifically, it will affect neighboring developments such as Bonita Bay and, of course, Pelican Landing, says Michael Timmerman, president and chief executive officer of Feasinomics, a Naples-based consulting firm.

The Hyatt will draw more people to vacation in Bonita Springs. They’ll shop and dine nearby and, if they like what they see, they might look for a vacation home in the area — probably in a community near the hotel. Eventually, that might lead to a full-time residence and perhaps an upgrade from a condo or villa to a single-family residence, D’Alessandro points out. In addition, executives who visit just might decide to relocate not only their families, but also their businesses to Southwest Florida, he says, as has happened in Collier County.

It creates an opportunity for more people to see the region and they may purchase property here, Pass says. “Then we have not only general contractors, but all the subcontractors, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, concrete finishers, tile setters — they’re all going to have an opportunity to make a little more money. It certainly will drive the economy in that direction.”

The same holds for Estero. In fact, the discussion should envelop both Bonita Springs and Estero because they’re “both going to equally benefit,” says D’Alessandro, who views Bonita Springs and Estero as one submarket in terms of real estate development and demographics. “I don’t think in five years from now you’ll be able to tell the difference between Bonita and Estero,” he says. “The price of land dictates the type of development in a market and the price of land is equally high in Estero as in Bonita.”

Even without the Hyatt, the region has been developing with a decidedly upscale emphasis. But D’Alessandro says the new resort fills a niche that has been missing. Southwest Florida International Airport, Florida Gulf Coast University and Interstate 75 are growth engines, seen as responsible for creating new commerce in area. “But what has been missing is a high-end hotel to service corporate clientele, so I think it’s going to fit very nicely and help propel that growth even more,” he says.

People won’t have to wait a long time to see the effects, D’Alessandro says. “After a year of being open, they’ll have enough people pass their the doors to understand our market and come back to visit ... By October 2002, you’re going to see a change. It starts out subtly, but I think you’ll start to see changes in the market by that time.”

Welcome Conventions

Indeed, many welcome the Hyatt to Lee County primarily for its ability to attract conventions and corporate business. The Naples area has established itself as an upscale destination, drawing well-heeled leisure visitors as well as business visitors and conventions to The Registry Resort, the two Ritz-Carlton hotels and a handful of other resorts. Lee County boasts its own tourism economy, but the highly prized convention business has been more elusive, limited to a few facilities, such as the four-star Sanibel Harbour Resort and Spa.

The new Hyatt, which hosts its first convention three days after the opening, will change that, says Janet Watermeier, director of the Economic Development Office of Lee County. “This is the first in south Lee County of this magnitude and this quality,” she says, adding that Hyatt hotels “predominantly go after the group meetings, corporate accounts, business meetings … It could bring in different groups and organizations that otherwise wouldn’t consider Lee County.”

A study by Watermeier’s office in 1999 predicted a capital investment of $150 million, and, combined withestimated direct and indirect wages, figured the new Hyatt probably would have a total economic impact of nearly $169 million.

The project cost about $156 million, says Carlos Cabrera, vice president and managing director of the new Hyatt. The privately owned Hyatt Hotels Corp. does not release its revenue figures, so he would not give projections. He does, however, estimate that meetings and conventions will represent “much more” than half of the business. “Hyatt is known as a group hotel,” he says, adding that the resort will cater to the same clientele as The Ritz-Carlton. By the end of the year, there will be two Ritz-Carlton resorts in Naples — The Ritz-Carlton, Naples, a beach resort, and The Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort, which is scheduled to open Dec. 6. “This is a spectacular Ritz here and they’ve got an incredible following,” Cabrera says. “The thing that we have going for us is our meeting space.”

“We don’t have many stay-and-play resorts here in Southwest Florida,” Pass says. “For all the courses we have here, they’re mostly private courses, and public courses get filled up really quick, so I’m sure they’ll market that rather heavily throughout the country and in Europe. The Hyatt has a worldwide marketing plan, so it will attract people from all over the world.”

Enough Business to Go Around

In spite of the competition, experts suggest that the new resort will simply increase the number of visitors in Southwest Florida.

“There’s enough new business for them,” says R. Scott Cameron, CCIM, president of Cameron Real Estate Services and former chairman of the Economic Development Council of Collier County. “We now have two Ritz-Carltons in Naples, so obviously Ritz-Carlton wasn’t worried about another facility drawing down the amount of business they get at the beach facility. I have to defer to them and presume they’ve done some market studies and found that, ‘Geez, there’s enough business here for one more.’”

“It’s not going to divert them from Naples. It’s opening up additional opportunities,” Timmerman says. A number of “boutique hotels” have opened in the area, such as the Trianon Center, catering to the business executive, which some prefer. “But when it comes to resort-quality, world-class hotels, we really don’t have that many,” he says, adding that the scarcity keeps demand high.

Watermeier believes that some of those who already visit the area might try the new hotel for a change, but it works both ways, she says. Much of the Hyatt’s business is already established in that corporations, associations and industries regularly hold conventions at various Hyatt hotels. The new Hyatt already has bookings through the rest of 2001, and several organizations and corporations are eyeing it for 2002 and 2003.

“Some of the major corporations will go from Hyatt to Hyatt in different parts of the country, so I think we’re going to see some new, high-level corporate and business activity in our marketplace coming to this Hyatt,” she says.

That’s the mindset of Hyatt officials, too. “You’ve got a hotel like the Hyatt that’s coming into an area that’s very familiar with our customers,” Schlosser says. “For so long, you had our competitors, The Registry and The Ritz-Carlton, here in Naples and our customers have been asking Hyatt to put product here. Now we are, and with the phenomenal space we have and the outdoor space and the features and amenities the entire property has to offer, it makes it very easy for our customers to want to come to our hotel.”

“We have a heck of a reservation distribution system and we have a heck of a clientele already,” says Cabrera. “We have a big, big resort clientele that visit all the Hyatt resorts.” Because of that, much of the competition is not even local, as Cabrera expects that the hotel will compete with other Hyatt properties, such as the Grand Cypress in Orlando, a Hyatt golf resort. “I’ll be competing with them for business. I’ll compete with the Hyatt resorts we have in Puerto Rico,” says Cabrera, who was chairman of the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau. That area, he says, loses a lot of major convention business to Southwest Florida.

“I don’t think we’re just going to take the pie that exists and slice it one more way,” he says. “When there are a lot of hotels, you should only add more if you’re going to bring more to the table and not just take the same and have everybody fight for it, because then you get into price wars and that’s the last thing you want to do. That doesn’t help anybody.”

Can the Labor Force Support Another Hotel?

The competition for good employees, though, might be a different story. The Hyatt will employ some 500 to 600 people to begin with. When the Hyatt’s time-share project — a partnership with WCI that will feature a golf course — is complete in a few years, that number will increase, Cabrera says.

A few key positions were filled internally. Most managers were hired through an online system, so applicants, including those already with the corporation, came from all over. “Response for all management positions has been unbelievable, wildly exceeding expectation,” he says. Most of the line workers were hired locally, largely through job fairs the Hyatt staged during the summer.

There are differing points of view about how the Hyatt will affect the labor force, as hoteliers are already experiencing a shortage of hotel staff. Some believe that the Hyatt will give employees at the economy hotels and less expensive resorts a chance to move up the career ladder. “It’s an opportunity for someone who’s been working at a full-service brand hotel to work for a top brand hotel,” D’Alessandro says.

Others wonder how easy it will be in a market that’s already starved for a good labor force. “They’re going to have to be creative to draw people in,” says Pass. “You see people giving sign-on bonuses and offering bonuses for current employees to bring in another employee. People that employ a lot of people are getting very creative on what they can do to get quality employees.”

The challenge is hardly new. When The Ritz-Carlton, Naples, opened in the mid-1980s, it was just a few months before The Registry opened. “We had a total shortage of employees then,” Cameron says. “The Ritz loaned them employees to help open the hotel. It was just a good neighbor gesture from one world-class organization to another.”

Cabrera faced a similar situation at a hotel in Aruba, where government restrictions on imported labor means unemployment is close to nil. “There were hotels that didn’t operate restaurant outlets because there was no staff,” he says. So the Hyatt teamed up with the hotel next door, sharing employees, even for big events such as Christmas parties. But the hotel never raided the other for employees and Cabrera says there is no intention of doing so here. “Obviously employees are free to pick and choose, but we would never raid one another,” he says. “We want to be good neighbors.”

But Cameron can see a case where several of the people that work in the world-class hotels in Naples perhaps live in Lee County and will look for a job closer to home. “It’s certainly going to be a competitive market,” he says. With the shortage of affordable housing in the Bonita-Estero area, Timmerman says that it’s likely that much of the staff will commute from farther north in Lee County.

“I’ve learned that here, come season, it gets very competitive for employees,” Cabrera says. “We have other markets that are highly seasonal … like Vail, that’s a very tough labor market. It’s a similar type thing, but it’s a successful resort, the hotel gives very good benefits, employees make plenty of money — that’s kind of what drives the whole thing.”

Adding Value to the Community

Of course, drawing visitors to the Estero area is likely to boost other businesses in the area, from the retailers and restaurants that visitors patronize, to the real estate, contractors and other services that new residents and regular visitors demand, including more cultural activities. The Hyatt, Cameron points out, could well lay the foundation for the type of community it will be.

“I think a Hyatt in Estero is probably a great thing to happen to Estero,” he says. “Estero was the beneficiary of having the tenth state university and look at the impact that that has had. But a university doesn’t necessarily bring the high-end development and now the Hyatt will be another piece of the puzzle that hopefully can round out the quality of the future of that area,” he says, pausing. “Or maybe I should say the future of the quality of that area.”

Jill Tyrer is a freelance writer and editor.