SYRACUSE, NY— The Great Lakes Companies of Madison, WI is close to signing a deal to serve as the developer of 4,000 hotel rooms that will serve as part of a mega-international destination mall in Syracuse, NY, HOTEL BUSINESS® has learned. Great Lakes is in talks with The Pyramid Cos., a Syracuse-based developer, which plans to create an international entertainment/shopping forum called Destiny USA. The $1.3 billion project would be created by transforming the existing 1.5-million-square-foot Carousel Center mall and expanding it by 3.5 million square feet, which will include a 68-acre indoor park with a reproduction of a 1,700-foot Erie Canal flowing through it. It would also include a 50,000-square-foot International Tourism/Exposition Center to promote upstate New York’s attractions. Destiny USA is part of a larger, 800-acre Onondaga Lakefront tourism district under development, whose goal is to create the second largest tourism gateway in New York State. Accessible from the major Interstate highways in central New York, the tourism district and the Destiny USA project itself are expected to draw heavily from the regional market, comprised of an estimated 75 million people within an eight-hour drive radius. In a unique financing plan, Destiny USA would be funded by New York State’s share of sales taxes generated by Destiny USA. The fund is expected to exceed $30 million annually. Pyramid hopes to break ground for the project in the spring, said spokesman Rick Pietrafesa, who noted that the company recently went back to local legislators requesting that the overall project have a hotel component to it. The current expansion estimate for the Carousel Center does not include square footage for the hotels, he said. Plans are for the project to be built by June 2004. Great Lakes’ signing of the hotel deal would mark a steady increase in the company’s portfolio, whose proprietary Great Wolf “log cabin” lodge product is already open in Wisconsin Dells, WI and Sandusky, OH. Great Lakes has also announced plans for a $25 million, 271-unit property in Kansas City, KS, which is set to open March 2003. On Feb. 1 it will break ground for another property, in Traverse City, MI. Other deals in the early stages include a property at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, one for the Canadian side of Niagara Falls and one for the Poconos region of Pennsylvania. It gets its equity financing from a “family and friends” network. Debt financing comes from local banks. Great Lakes’ overall portfolio includes 14 hotels carrying flags like Country Inns & Suites, Fairfield Inn, Hawthorn and Microtel, but it is the log-cabin product that would be featured in the Destiny USA project, where plans, should they go forward, include a 400- to 600-room Great Wolf Lodge. A 250- to 300-room, limited-service hotel would kick off the project, said Lund. Great Lakes was invited to vie for the project by Pyramid Development— which has strong experience in the retail market— in October, said Lund. “Their market study shows they anticipate needing as many as 4,000 rooms,” he said. “We are coming in as hoteliers and saying, ‘Here is how we would structure it, and here is how we would phase it in,’ instead of just going in and building a 4,000-room hotel or a couple of 2,000-room hotels.” Great Lakes’ plan, instead, said Lund, would be to build properties as the market demands, similar to how The Walt Disney Co. has built up its Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. “We want to build them as there is demand,” he said. “The first will be a franchised hotel, and then a series of franchised hotels, and the Great Wolf Lodge. There might even be an independent, ‘Destiny USA’ hotel.”
