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Sedona Arizona Spa Resorts Renovations and Expansion

March 25th, 2009

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With room rates topping $500 a night in peak season for its signature creekside cottages, the exclusive L’Auberge de Sedona resort attracts a wealthy, well-traveled crowd.

Guests check in with ultrahigh expectations, expectations that hotel officials admit haven’t been universally met as the 25-year-old resort showed its age in recent years.
“Stale,” “dated” and “old” are words sprinkled in reviews posted in the past year on TripAdvisor.com, a popular travel-review site.

L’Auberge’s new owner hopes to erase any negative impressions – and attract a new generation of fans – by plowing $25 million into a major renovation and expansion.

The project, which began earlier this year, will add 17 hillside cottages the size of small houses (with a nightly mortgage to match), and 16 spa cottages. In total, L’Auberge will go from 56 rooms and cottages to 89, increasing its supply more than half.

Existing rooms and cottages are being updated to include amenities that have become standard in upscale and even midrange hotels: flat-screen televisions, iPod docking stations, wireless Internet and the like.

Workers are expanding outdoor decks on the cottages and addressing past guest complaints about poor lighting and low ceilings.

“We’re competing (for) people who live in gorgeous homes,” said Joe Mottershead, general manager of L’Auberge since 2006. “Our customers come in, and they’re looking for things they have at home . . . We’ve got to stay up with that.”

In follow-up surveys sent to guests, L’Auberge long has gotten marks in the mid- to high 90s out of 100 for its service, he said. Its rankings for the quality of the “product” have been nearly 10 points below. The goal is to close that gap. He said the resort is seeing early results from guests who have tried the renovated cottages.

Exclusive and well-known as it is, it doesn’t rank in the top 10 among 44 Sedona hotels and resorts rated on TripAdvisor based on reviews and proprietary factors.

“We anticipate that score to skyrocket as we bring these new units online,” he said.

Part of the lag in upkeep, Mottershead said, is because of ownership changes in the past few years.

L’Auberge was last renovated in 2004, but the effort wasn’t anywhere near as extensive as this one, especially in terms of updating furnishings, he said.

Scottsdale attorney and developer Al Spector, who purchased the hotel and adjacent property for nearly $40 million in May from a California hotel company, is redoing the entire place.

Spector owns the neighboring Amara Resort in Sedona and was one of the developers of the Scottsdale Princess, now known as Fairmont Scottsdale.

The main lodge, which has 21 guest rooms and suites, is done, as are half the cottages. Construction on the hillside cottages, which L’Auberge hopes to rent for $800 to $1,500 a night, is due to begin soon and be completed by the end of September.

The major expansion and makeover come at a time when hoteliers in Sedona and across the country are having a difficult time filling rooms.

Sedona’s occupancy in December and January fell below 40 percent for the first time in several years, according to Smith Travel Research. It stood at 34.6 percent in January, the latest month available, down from 40.3 percent a year earlier.

Fiscal year-to-date lodging-tax collections in Sedona are off 8.4 percent.

“We’re as concerned about the economy as anyone,” Mottershead said.

He said the resort’s timing may actually prove to be good, because the renovations have taken a lot of its rooms off the market as occupancy was plunging. On average, it has been down about 15 rooms and cottages, or more than one-quarter of its supply, every month this year.

It is slowing the renovation pace for its busy months of March and April, and bookings look solid, he said.

With its creekside setting and national reputation as a first-class romantic getaway, Mottershead said L’Auberge has generally outperformed its competitors in Sedona on key industry measures.

L’Auberge’s occupancy was 86 percent in 2007 and 84 percent in 2008, driving its decision to expand, Mottershead said.

“We turned away more business the past two years than we were actually able to book,” he said. “That gives you an indication of the kind of demand for the type of product we have.”

L’Auberge hopes the hillside cottages, which offer its first full views of Sedona’s trademark red rocks, and spa cottages will attract younger travelers.

It also hopes to gain a name with its new outdoor showers in its cottages, an idea it borrowed from some luxury Napa Valley resorts.

“We thought it would translate really well to Sedona,” he said.

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Arizona Resort Spas, Arizona Spas, Building a spa Sedona Spa Renovation, spa expansion

New challenges at the Wigwam Resort’s Red Door Spa

July 10th, 2008

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This article is brought to you by Spavelous.com.

http://www.spavelous.com

Spa manager enjoys change

Every day brings new challenges at the Wigwam Resort’s Red Door Spa

Cassie Hernandez took a job as a makeup artist at a Red Door Spa in Illinois simply to pay for college.

She had known since she was a kid that she wanted to be a lawyer, relishing the “right vs. wrong” mentality, the debating and the politics. She headed down that path by studying criminal justice at a community college outside of Chicago.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Bar exam: She grew to love the world of pampering.

Hernandez has been with the luxury Red Door chain, which has 31 locations, ever since and is now one of its youngest general managers, based at the Red Door Spa at the Wigwam Golf Resort & Spa in Litchfield Park.

She said she was driven by people who told her when she joined Red Door as a makeup technician that the highest position she could attain was department manager. “I thought, that’s absolutely impossible,” Hernandez said.

In reality, she rose quickly to department manager and then had a succession of managerial jobs that culminated with her appointment at the Wigwam before it opened in early 2006. She said the best part about her job is the blank slate that each day brings.

“I like not knowing what tomorrow’s going to bring,” she said. “That doesn’t make things mundane; it makes it exciting.”

Hernandez, who oversees a staff of 49, said there are a host of misperceptions about the job. The response she gets most: “Oh, you must be relaxed.”

“What a lot of people don’t know about the operations of a spa is, you do HR, you do payroll, you do operations. You’re kind of everything in one,” she said.

The spa business has changed dramatically in the past several years, with the advent of day spas and medical spas bringing intense competition to the likes of the Red Door Spa and other destination resort spas. The new kids on the block have sharpened operations at places like the Red Door.

“You have to be willing to change your old habits,” she said.

Hernandez said that means doing things such as allowing customers to tailor their treatments. If there’s an hour-long massage and a client wants 45 minutes of it concentrated on the feet, so be it.

The economy has brought another challenge. Hernandez estimates the resort side of the spa business is down about 18 percent in the past few months, as financially pinched vacationers stay home.

The spa decided to focus even more on guests in the Wigwam’s backyard, who already account for a chart-topping 60 percent of the spa’s business. It offered group discounts for friends who came in together and drew on a database of e-mails provided by former guests.

“The entire industry is changing every day,” Hernandez said.