Lodge expands area's meeting spaces

Flathead County's available meeting spaces will increase by 16 percent Monday when the Lodge at Whitefish Lake opens its doors.

The upscale 100-unit hotel - complete with a marina, fitness center, lounge, restaurant and roughly 40 full- and part-time employees - will have a low-key "soft opening" Monday, accepting customers while still working on facilities such as a spa and gift shop.

The lodge includes 8,000 square feet of meeting spaces, including a conference room, patio and executive board room. That will be a big boost to the 50,022 square feet scattered across 42 meeting rooms in nine other Flathead County hotels and resorts.

The Whitefish lodge - built by Dan Averill of the longtime local family that set up a dude ranch and resorts near Flathead Lake - already has its meeting space booked from June 1 to the first three weeks of August.

Plus the lodge, which began construction last March, is hitting the ground running

"We've got several different groups on board [for meetings} between the first of the year and spring. We don't want to wait," said Tyler Jarvis, the lodge's general manager.

Meeting spaces are usually filled during the peak visitor seasons in Flathead County, but the potential exists for the county to play host to more organizations, associations and businesses functions, observers said.

Flathead facilities are not set up like Las Vegas to handle huge conventions, but local hotels are primed to handle meetings of up to 250 to 300 people, observers said, with a possible leap to 500.

"These are the groups we can accommodate well," said Carol Edgar, head of the public relations firm Edge Communications and former executive director of the Flathead Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Edgar also is the hired publicist for the Lodge at Whitefish Lake.

The difference between a "convention" and a "big meeting" is a fuzzy one and is mostly a subjective assessment of the scale of the gathering. Conventions are usually big annual affairs. Meetings are usually smaller and held more frequently.

Flathead County and the Glacier National Park area have 109 hotels and motels with 3,421 rooms among them, said Dori Hamilton, executive director of the Flathead Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Prior to the Lodge at Whitefish Lake's opening, nine hotels - ranging from 48 to 162 rooms - offered meeting spaces from 800 to 11,000 square feet, according to visitor bureau literature. These can accommodate between 50 and 675 people in their meeting rooms. Those rooms can be modified to become banquet halls, classrooms or theaters.

The area's hotel use hits its peak in July and August each year, when they are usually 90 to 100 percent occupied, Hamilton said. That drops

to 70 to 80 percent in June and September. Snow props up local lodging use to 50 percent to 60 percent from December through March.

The low months are April, May, October and November, when only 30 to 40 percent of rooms are filled, she said.

Hotels scout for meetings during those low-use months.

Government agencies, corporations, associations and reunions - plus social, educational and religious groups - are prime candidates for off-season meetings, Hamilton said.

Meeting planners usually have to think ahead one to three years in this very labor-intensive, detail-oriented world.

Besides prices, Edgar said planners look at four aspects in the places they are considering as meeting hosts:

. The number and quality of the guest rooms.

. Whether there is adequate meeting space and whether hotels have items such as audio-visual equipment available.

. The quality and variety of food and beverages.

. The staff's expertise in hospitality, catering and conference management.

The addition of the Lodge at Whitefish Lake helps the area attract meetings because it lets planners shop and compare within a specific region, Edgar said.

The Flathead Valley has some advantages in attracting meetings, Hamilton and Edgar said. These include the area's beautiful mountain valley setting, its affordability and access by airplane and train.

Area weaknesses include not enough available flights into Glacier Park International Airport and a lack of large conference facilities, Hamilton said. Meanwhile, Edgar sees some hotels being strong on the four aspects of hosting meetings that planners look for, and some hotels not understanding the importance of some of those components.

Hamilton and Edgar split in their opinions on whether a state rule on hotel bed taxes is hampering the Flathead in marketing its facilities.

That rule says that bed taxes on hotel rooms - which are sent to the state with some money rerouted back to the communities - cannot be spent to market hotels to other areas in Montana. The idea is that one city's convention bureau won't use state money to draw business from another Montana city. This money can only be used to attract out-of-state business.

The Flathead bureau gets about $40,000 of this money annually - all from hotels in Kalispell.

Edgar sees the rest of Montana as a prime market for using Flathead County hotels as meeting spaces and believes this rule hampers the area's marketing efforts.

Hamilton does not see the rule as a handicap, agreeing with the rationale behind it. Major Montana meeting groups, such as government agencies, usually rotate around the state and can be attracted without an infusion of bed-tax money, she said.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com