BANGOR, Maine — Construction of Bangor’s next hotel is on schedule in spite of two early November snowstorms and a third that’s on its way, according to an Ocean Properties official.
Ocean Properties, which owns more than 100 hotels and resorts in North America, is building a 124-room, five-story hotel next door to the Cross Insurance Center. The Residence Inn by Marriott will be the sixth hotel built in Bangor since 2006.
Two snowstorms earlier this month forced construction crews to shovel out their work areas, but that didn’t cause any concerning delays, according to Tom Varley, vice president of operations at Ocean Properties.
“We’re still on schedule for a late spring or early summer opening,” Varley said Monday.
Manchester, New Hampshire-based ProCon Inc., the contractor on the project, broke ground in what used to be a parking lot last summer. ProCon has built hotels, residential facilities, office and commercial spaces across New England.
The foundation is down, stairwells and elevator shafts are standing. Steel beams set the boundaries of the ground floor, and the wooden framework and walls of the first floor are going up quickly. Plans for the hotel were unveiled a year ago.
The hotel will include a roughly 100-seat restaurant with a separate entrance, and people not staying at the hotel would be welcome to eat there. The restaurant is expected to be unique to the hotel, rather than a chain.
The new hotel and restaurant are expected to employ about 150 people.
The Residence Inn likely will give its next door neighbor, the Cross Insurance Center, a valuable bargaining chip when it tries to court conventions and events. The hotel also is likely to draw guests traveling to Bangor to see a Waterfront Concerts performance.
“Every day, I look over there with excitement about the daily progress,” Cross Insurance Center General Manager Joe Imbriaco said Friday. “Not only are we about concerts and family events, a large part of our success is tied to our convention center staying busy.”
One of the most important tools for courting conferences and conventions to use the city’s new venue is having enough hotel rooms to house people nearby, he said. About one-third of the building’s revenue is driven by convention, meeting and banquet traffic, rather than concerts and events.
Imbriaco said he already has spoken with the future general manager of the hotel, as well as managers of other area hotels, about the potential of reserving rooms for conferences and conventions as far off as 2018.
“Having another great property join the ones we already have here is a key component in what’s going to drive our success in the future,” Imbriaco said.
Freeport-based Maine Course Hospitality Group, which owns the 90-room Courtyard Marriott adjacent to Interstate 95 on Sylvan Road, opened a second hotel, a TownePlace Suites, right next door in October.
Since the Courtyard Marriott was completed in 2006, three other hotels have been built in Bangor — the Hilton Garden Inn on Haskell Road and Hollywood Casino on Main Street in 2008 and the Hampton Inn across the street from the Hilton in 2011.
Varley said Ocean Properties and the project contractor are planning a “hardhat event” for early 2015 to mark the Residence Inn project’s progress.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter @nmccrea213.