PANAMA Town BEACH — Visitors have a new, extra easy location to continue to be while traveling through the Northwest Florida Seashores Global Airport (ECP).
Hilton Backyard garden Inn opened on Thursday, near the intersection of Venture Crossings Boulevard and West Bay Parkway. The growth was spearheaded by the St. Joe Corporation and is the first resort to open near the airport.
It features more than 140 rooms, a assembly house, pool, health and fitness center and total-provider restaurant.
“It truly is great for our group and excellent for the airport,” stated Parker McClellan, govt director of ECP. “It will deliver a profit to our passengers for individuals early-early morning departures, as perfectly as the late-night time arrivals. Early-early morning departures seriously would not (sense) as early if you stay at the lodge.”
St. Joe Corporation:breaks floor on to start with airport resort
Extra:St. Joe expects to open up Hilton Yard Inn near PCB airport subsequent summer season
When the resort is convenient for travellers, David Demarest, hospitality spokesman for St. Joe, mentioned it also will profit the local overall economy by building it a lot easier for these visiting Bay County on company journeys.
The lodge is located about 12 miles from Pier Park, arguably the heart of the Beach, and about 7 miles from Latitude Margaritaville Watersound, a Jimmy-Buffett themed community geared towards these 55 a long time previous and more mature.
“The airport is likely to be an essential aspect of how people today take a look at the area and how persons do business enterprise in the region,” Demarest said. “No one has a lodge within just likely a 10-mile location.”
According to Katja Chatfield, common manager of the lodge, the facility experienced its 1st guest inside of 3 hrs of opening at 2 p.m. Thursday. That number jumped to about 20 later that night time.
Chatfield extra that the lodge is open to every person and not just those touring by the airport.
“If you fly in or you get any of your family members customers or friends to the airport, you cannot skip us,” she said. “If you’re heading to the airport for everything at all, we are right in this article … a attractive, model new, glowing penny.”
Amongst the first wave of attendees to stay at the hotel was Ian Andrzejewski, who came to install the computer software package used to deal with the hotel’s bar and restaurant.
Andrzejewski claimed he usually travels about the country and that basically every airport has a close by resort for company.
He noted the airport’s restaurant, Yard Grille & Bar, is about double the dimension of the dining places he has visited at other Hilton Backyard Inns. It’s not only open up to visitors, but anyone in the group.
“Owning an … airport which is a fast travel or a rapid stroll from (a hotel) is super handy for overnights, for overlays, for small business vacationers,” Andrzejewski claimed. “I think it truly is going to be fantastic for the nearby enterprise community and anyone coming by.”
Panama City Beach Mayor Mark Sheldon explained the Hilton Backyard Inn will be “a launching pad” for extra lodges to be constructed surrounding ECP, which continues to encounter continual expansion and passed more than 1 million passengers for the very first time in 2019.
Sheldon mentioned he expects other lodges in the area could be declared afterwards this yr.
“Acquiring more lodging selections around our active airport offers extra flexibility to all in the space,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It also drives far more action for people out of point out who have an early flight to spend the night shut to the airport.”
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