New hotel part of Polynesian Cultural Center, BYU-H plans

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The 45-year-old Laie Inn closed for good Nov. 1, leaving Hawaii's largest paid attraction, the Polynesian Cultural Center, without adjacent tourist lodging.

That closure also has an impact on visitors to the BYU-Hawaii campus, also next door, and the Mormon temple a few blocks away.

A few years will pass before a new 228-room hotel is likely to rise on the site of the Laie Inn. When it does, the updated space for visitors will also be a laboratory for BYU-Hawaii students studying hospitality and tourism management.

BYU-Hawaii President Steven C. Wheelwright said the university has a corporate-level agreement with Marriott to integrate the new hotel with the BYU-H business school. "We probably spent half a day looking at what they needed, what we needed, what would be better for our students," he said. "This hotel would actually be structured so it would primarily be staffed by students, from housekeeping and operations to front desk and everything else," Wheelwright said. "Professionals will be involved as well, but the intent is to make this a training ground."

Students can earn industry certifications all while working at the hotel. "It's a win-win because our students are getting additional training for what's going to be their job or their profession," Wheelwright said.

The plans also fit in with the university's plans to expand. "We need more jobs. We anticipate those won't come from the PCC," which already employs more than 600 university students. "We're going to need additional sources of employment, especially for our international students," Wheelwright said.

The Laie Inn had only 48 rooms and had a quaint roadside-motel atmosphere about it, but that setting minimized it's use to the business school.

The inn also never functioned as an anchor hotel for the PCC, where the sprawling parking lot fills nightly with tour buses and rental cars carrying people who made the trip from hotels in Honolulu.

Still, the inn is an iconic landmark. The inn's demolition to make room for a much larger hotel means Laie's only gas station and a McDonalds restaurant next door will also likely be displaced.

Hawaii Reserves Inc., the property management arm for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has not yet released a detailed site plan or information about where the current businesses will go.

"It looks like the new hotel will be a Marriott, but no agreements have been finalized at this point," said Richard Vierra, property management director for Hawaii Reserves.

The new hotel will be more than four times the size of the Laie Inn, but Laie will not become a hotel resort town. "This will be 'the' hotel in Laie as there's really nothing else planned for the forseable future," Vierra said.

__IMAGE1__Richard E. Marriott lends a unique perspective in the project as chairman of the board of Host Hotels and Resorts and chairman of the PCC. "I'm assuming it will be a Marriott brand with an exterior that fits in with the Hawaiian theme," he said.

A preliminary rendering shows an elevation capping at 40 feet with an exterior that blends well with the PCC's grass roofs, designed to showcase a "Polynesian sense of place," with other Pacific Island architectural elements, according to Hawaii Reserves.

Details of the new development will follow project approval by The LDS Church's governing First Presidency.

The step-up in scale is also helpful to the 880-acre Turtle Bay Resort a few minutes away in Kahuku. "We would like to see the project with Marriott go forward," said Keoki Wallace, Turtle Bay Resort's public relations manager.

The timing of the project is advantageous as well because of the current visitor slump in the down economy, he said.

Turtle Bay is currently booking 84 percent of its rooms but expects it can consistently book at a higher rate once new, more comparable lodging is close by and the two hotels can refer customers to each other when they overbook.

Demolition of the Laie Inn is expected to begin before the end of the year with groundbreaking for the new hotel anticipated in about a year.


E-mail: sfidel@desnews.com