Westin to Enter Sacramento Market with Reflagging of 100-Room Hotel

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., parent company of Westin Hotels & Resorts, has decided that the Westin flag will fly in Sacramento, Calif., for the first time, through the rebranding of the 100-room Le Rivage Hotel. 

Starwood’s $3.2 million renovation of Le Rivage, owned by Urban Commons/Brighton Management, will pave the way for the transformation of the property into the Westin Sacramento. Carrying the address of 4350 Riverside Blvd., the luxury lodging destination sits along the Sacramento River within close proximity of the Sacramento Convention Center Complex.  It’s a location that provides the hotel, which has 7,000 square feet of its own meeting and event space, with a substantial pool of potential guests at its front door.

And the state of the Sacramento hotel market in general bodes well for the Westin Sacramento’s success. “In general, demand has been up,” Mike Testa, senior vice president with the Sacramento Convention & Visitors Bureau, Convention Sales & Business Development, told Commercial Property Executive. “We’re a second tier city so oftentimes when San Francisco does well, we do well.”

The upswing in the Sacramento hotel market comes as a bit of a surprise. “Unfortunately in any recession, the second-tier cities are usually the ones that recover the slowest, but thankfully we’ve seen a speedier recovery than we initially thought would happen,” he added. 

Westin is going through a growth spurt, and secondary and tertiary cities in the U.S. are high on the list. In December, the brand debuted in Southwest Florida with the opening of the 263-room Westin Cape Coral Resort at Marina Village, formerly the Resort at Marina Village, in Cape Coral. And earlier this month, Westin made its entrée in to Birmingham, Ala., with the opening of the 294-room Westin Alabama, also a converted property. 

“Westin is attracting a growing number of conversion opportunities, especially in more mature, metropolitan markets,” Allison Reid, senior vice president of North America development with Starwood Hotels, said in a prepared statement. “The phenomenal success of the Westin brand’s distinct positioning has generated fierce loyalty among global travelers and inspired a growing number of owners and developers to reposition existing assets under the Westin flag.”

The Westin Sacramento will be introduced to the market in April of this year.