News

Source: Vancouver Sun

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By Evan Duggan, Special to the Vancouver Sun

The early positive reaction to the new eco-friendly hotel in Burnaby’s tallest tower shows that the city’s hospitality industry is playing catch-up to its booming business travel market, say the stakeholders behind the development.

The 169-room Element Vancouver Metrotown hotel, which had its grand opening in May, is part of Bosa Properties’ new Sovereign building, Burnaby’s tallest tower at 45 storeys. Bosa Properties handed the reigns to the building’s hotel component to Element, a relative newcomer to the Canadian market under the massive Starwood Hotels & Resorts umbrella. The hotel marks Element’s first opening in Western Canada, and its second nationwide, since its 2008 launch.

The 500-foot-tall building on Willingdon and Kingsway also includes 202 condos and 100,000 square feet of retail space, including Glowbal Restaurant Group’s Trattoria.

Over the last 10 years, the Metrotown area has had a residential boom but also has been attracting more business events and travellers, said Bosa Properties senior vice-president, Daryl Simpson. “It’s emerging as a highly sought-after location for people to stay temporarily while on business or vacation,” he said in an interview last week.

He said the hotel is the company’s first move into the hospitality industry. The city’s zoning restrictions on the site meant they had to develop a building that would create jobs, but they didn’t want to build another office tower because of oversupply in the area, Simpson said. They opted to team up with a hotel company that caters to long-term business travellers and suburban vacationers.

“There are not a lot of alternatives for a budget-minded yet stylish business traveller outside of downtown Vancouver,” he said.

The block where Sovereign stands includes two other residential towers and an office tower developed by Bosa Properties. Simpson said the new tower culminates a 15-year-long development.

The trajectory for the Element brand is ambitious. There are now roughly 16 of the green-centric hotels around the world, said Ken Boyd, director of sales and marketing for Element Vancouver Metrotown. “They anticipate that by 2017, there will be nearly 100.”

He said every Element in the chain must be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certified. “There are no exceptions to that rule no matter where it is.”

The Burnaby location is LEED-Silver certified, he said. “The majority of things we do in this hotel have a definite focus towards green.”

He said the lobby chandeliers are made from recycled plastic. The guest room flooring is made partly from recycled tires; the sofa coverings from soy; and the bathroom products come from refillable dispensers instead of mini plastic bottles, which end up in the landfill.

Their conference and meeting program is also driven by an eco-friendly vision. “We give our meeting planners the opportunity to pick from a variety of fairly simplistic things, like sustainable menu options, using bulk packing as opposed to individual packets and not using plastic water bottles,” Boyd said.

“They pick the items they want, we put it into our tracking system and it spits out a report that tells them how much they’ve reduced their water consumption, energy consumption, and what that equates to,” he said.

For instance, conference guests are shown what their choices translate into in terms of number of trees planted, or cars removed from the road.

He said they designed guest rooms for business travellers or vacationers who have been the road for five or more days. All of the suites come with fully equipped kitchens.

Boyd said business travellers to Burnaby have been underserved.

“I think there has been pent-up demand here,” he said, adding Element has had three “perfect fills” in their first three months of operation. “There isn’t a ton of hotels in Burnaby, but there is a significant amount of business that functions out here.”

The new hotel brings much needed additional guest-room and meeting-space capacity to Burnaby, said Nancy Small, Tourism Burnaby executive director.

“We’re really the hub of the Lower Mainland. It’s easy to get here from anywhere and vice versa. From a business perspective, that’s what people really look for,” she said, adding that sporting groups such as hockey and soccer tournaments are typically a major annual draw for the city, and those people need places to stay as well. “That’s also been a very positive thing for us.”