New look for the Pere Marquette

I've been in New Orleans this week, and I decided to stop by the Renaissance Pere Marquette hotel, located just a couple of blocks from the city's renowned French Quarter. We're currently working on a feature story on this property for Hotel Design magazine, so I thought it would be interesting to see it in person.

This hotel, which has been open less than a decade, was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with the basement flooding and the lobby level seeing several feet of water, as well, according to current general manager Frank Zumbo.

"This hotel sustained some pretty substantial flood damage … we’re talking about two or three feet of standing water in the lobby for three or four weeks, so the entire first floor was completely gutted. All the laundry downstairs, the engineering, the electrical had to be rebuilt.”

The first-floor restaurant was also completely destroyed. As a result, they stayed closed until December 2005, when they reopened with a temporary front desk upstairs. The current bar area served as a temporary restaurant location. About a year after reopening, the process for the redesign started.

The redesigned first floor has three zones: the social business zone, the individual zone, and the delighted-to-serve zone, which includes the front desk and the concierge.

“Lobby space in hotels, we’re seeing it start to change in the industry. It’s more than a lobby, it’s potentially a revenue center. It’s important to design the space for how customers use it,” said Zumbo.

And the feedback from the new design, which debuted this past New Year's Eve?

“Feedback from guests on the design has been fantastic. They believe it is very imaginative, very cutting-edge. There’s probably not a day that goes by that people don’t stop and take a picture of this focal point [the red bubbles suspended above the bar]. … They really like the space because it’s so unique.”

According to Zumbo, that's something unique to Renaissance.

"Our customers, while they’re seasoned travelers, they’re traveling for business, but they might as well have fun … they want to discover things in the cities that they’re in and even the hotels that they’re in," he said.

From a revenue standpoint, the redesign is a clear winner, he says.

“It’s actually given us more capacity to hire people. … We’re generating revenue in a space where we didn’t generate revenue before, whether it’s food sales, coffee sales, beverage sales,” Zumbo said.