BCBusiness

September/October 2022 - ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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( the informer ) 16 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 T E R M S + C ON DI T ION S Our contribution to the language of business and beyond BC FERRIES; BC NDP; ISTOCK Board•walk Em•pire The collection of board apparel shops on Vancouver's West Fourth Avenue Scape Boat BC Ferries CEO Mark Collins, who was fired in July after 173 cancelled sailings in 28 days Eby Rid•er When no current MLAs oppose a path to the premiership Con Air The annual scramble BCers make to the nearest hardware store when the heatwave hits in the world rankings for con- vention organizers. Stewart is looking at trying to get federal land near the port (remember when there was a plan to build a hotel and casino there 25 years ago?) or at the PNE or, really, anywhere, for new hotels. Maybe some kind of new zoning. Incentives. Using hotel taxes to put money into building new hotels. Something. More details to come later. "Really, the concern is that it's hard to make money build- ing hotels, so we need a strat- egy to do this, like maybe build it into the Vancouver Plan," said Stewart. But among all the specula- tion is some real news buried partway through this story: It looks like some developers are taking the plunge, banking on the extreme shortage and future profits. At the moment, there are three hotels under construc- tion, four that have been ap- proved, and several more in pre-approval stages, from what I can gather through conversa- tions with various developers and a cruise through the city's rezoning site. One—the application for which only went through in late summer—would be for Vancouver's first of the hipster pod-type hotels that have pro- liferated in Europe and started popping up in North America. I stayed in one in Seattle, a CitizenM that's part of a Neth- erlands chain. Rooms smaller than a dorm room, with a com- fy, plushy bed that goes wall to wall, a Plexiglas-encased shower in the corner and just enough room to get from the door to the bed with a teeny sink on one side, and a teeny desk on the other. But then a big fun bar in the centre of the lobby and all kinds of lounging, games-playing, TV-watching, hanging-out "spaces" scattered around that main-floor bar. In Vancouver, that new entrant is coming from New York-based Moxy and being planned for a site on Seymour Street if it can meet the city's re- quirements, which to me sound somewhat pause-inducing. This is the note I got back from the city about whether a pod-style hotel is legal in Vancouver, which I'd been told maybe wasn't. "There aren't minimum room sizes for hotels… but there are accessibility and life safety requirements that would govern things like door and corridor widths throughout the build- ing, and specific accessibility requirements for a subset of the rooms (1 in 40) that would re- quire specific clearances. With regards to "pod" hotels, build- ing staff have noted that: " POD hotels may be problematic if they don't consider accessibility, and don't have the necessary fire separation between units or sprinkler protection. Each guest 'room' would be considered separate from the others and fire spread between them would need to be considered." So, we'll see on that one. Some of the new hotels are stand-alone but others are part of mixed-use develop- ments—another consequence of the intense competition for land, especially downtown. Jon Stovell of Reliance Proper- ties said he's looking at putting some hotel space into a prime site at Robson and Hornby downtown, but mainly because there's a city requirement for some kind of commercial in the building. "A stand-alone hotel is tough. Condos underwrite the hotel." I haven't heard about any new hotels yet in the old style, with a lot of big banquet and meeting rooms, the kind that I've been to a hundred conven- tions in. Again, those are dif- ficult to plan and finance. Hotel builders these days are going for the clients who don't care much about the "star" rating system based on amenities like pools and conference centres and in-house restaurants that hotels used to be ranked by, says architect Ryan Bragg at Perkins+Will, a company that's approached by a lot of potential hotel developers. Influenced by the popularity of the Airbnb experience, new hotel builders are sticking to the basics: a room good for sleep- ing or working in, maybe a cool place to hang out in the lobby. Even the old Four Seasons in the Pacific Centre Mall, now being remodelled, is tearing out much of the meeting-room space that dominated the main floor. There's also no sign yet that the idea of a cute boutique ho- tel in one of Vancouver's hip, tourist-attracting neighbour- hoods—Kits, Mount Pleasant, Commercial Drive—is going to get traction any time soon. There's a hotel being planned in a condo development at 41st and Oak, but nothing beyond that. So far, the land prices combined with the low number of rooms that would likely be allowed just don't make any sense to anyone. So it looks like, for now at least, the pressure on Airbnb- type rentals to make up for that missing-middle hotel is just go- ing to keep increasing. £

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