The head of Sutton Place Hotels said they will open another facility under their Sandman Signature brand in Dartmouth Crossing in addition to the luxury hotel going into the Nova Centre complex.
Tom Gaglardi, CEO of the hotel groups and president of Northland Properties Corp., joined Premier Stephen McNeil, Mayor Mike Savage and developer Joe Ramia of Argyle Developments in a ceremony at the new convention centre on Thursday to announce the Nova Centre deal.
Gaglardi let slip the second location while speaking to media after the announcement.
“It’s great and it’s not our only project,” he said. “We’re also going to be breaking ground (on) a hotel in Dartmouth, as well, so we’re making a big commitment to the area.”
The Dartmouth Crossing project will start this summer, he said, with a possible target opening date of autumn 2020. He did not say how big the hotel will be.
“They were really parallel efforts,” he said. “We worked on Dartmouth and it came together. We worked on downtown and it came together.”
It’s hoped the 262-room Sutton Place hotel in the Nova Centre will open in the spring of 2019.
The basic structure is in place but the rooms have to be built and fixtured.
“It’ll be about a nine- (or) 10-month project to get to the end,” Gaglardi said.
“In a perfect world, we’d have more rooms,” he said. “It’s a smaller property than what we’re used to having but that’s the building that was approved and built. It’s a good size. But I think the market with this type of convention centre is going to need hotel rooms, so we expect this particular hotel to run a very high occupancy.”
Conventions will be a big part of the target market, as well as “high-end leisure” corporations and businesspeople.
“Weekends, you’ve got to be great at leisure because typically the businesspeople aren’t travelling and conventions don’t typically happen on a weekend,” Gaglardi said. “So (a) strong corporate, convention, leisure mix.”
The Sutton Place Hotel group has hotels in Vancouver, Edmonton and Revelstoke with more being built in Calgary, Winnipeg and Frisco, Tex. The Nova Centre location will be the first one in Atlantic Canada.
“It’s just a beautiful opportunity,” Gaglardi said. “I’ve loved this city for a long time. Our peoplehave loved this city and it’s been a tough market to find the right way to get in. So we’ve had
our eyes on Halifax for about six or seven years. We finally found the opportunity.”
Gaglardi, who is the owner of the NHL’s Dallas Stars, said the group looked at acquiring other hotels as well as other options before partnering with the Ramia family.
Ramia said “every brand you can think of” had approached him about the opportunity at the Nova Centre but he was willing to be patient.
“We’ve had many opportunities to do a deal on this hotel but we were looking for the right partner to be here and the right brand to be here,” Ramia said. “Once we met Tom (Gaglardi) and his team, it became obvious it’s a family business much like our business.”
That, and the Sutton Place brand, provided the right formula.
“It took us a while to find the
right partner,” Ramia said. “We believe we’ve made a great choice in the partner that we have.”
Gaglardi said his group was “out of things to do in the West,” so turned their eyes to expanding across the country.
“We’re focused on a lot of work in Ontario right now and the Maritimes is interesting to us. We’re active in Scotland and England and Texas as well. We’ve got lots of arms growing and this is a market we always wanted to enter.”
Gaglardi said Halifax has a lot going for it, both naturally and geographically.
“You’ve got such a beautiful place. Very accessible, as well, long-standing connections to the east coast of the U.S. This
is a great place to be. Our dollar now will see a lot of U.S. influence and a lot of U.S. demand and that should be very welcome by the community to have Americans coming here. And I think, with this facility, we’ll have a chance to land a lot of American business that otherwise we wouldn’t have seen.
“This makes Halifax a real contender on the small- to medium- centre stage.”
Premier McNeil said it was the culmination of Ramia’s vision.
“This magnificent facility that we have here is continuing now to welcome people to our province,” he said.
“It’s confirmation in many ways that an international company will now invest in our city because of this facility, to add a wonderful hotel (and) to add to the many hotels that we already have in the city.”
Ramia said the centre now has deals with tenants to account for about 70 per cent of capacity.
He declined to identify them, however, saying they all want to make their own announcements The convention centre officially opened its doors in December.
The Nova Centre cost an estimated $500 million to build, with taxpayers covering about $169 million and the bill shared by three levels of government.