San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HOW MANY HIGH-END HOTELS CAN NAPA HANDLE?
Fred Larson Jr. feels wistful and a bit irked when he roams around Napa. To the core he’s a “Napkin,” the nickname for longtime locals, who attended Vintage High School in the 1980s. Back then, downtown was a dead zone and one of the bigger draws was Woolworth’s and its lunch counter.
Before the fine dining destinations and boutique hotels planted their flags, Napa County was more like Small Town U.S.A., a place of wide-open fields and farms sometimes tucked into neighborhoods. But the upscaling over the past two decades has transformed the area into a place Larson doesn’t recognize.
“I can’t imagine how my dad must feel when he drives around Napa,” says Larson who now lives just north, in Lake County, and visits his father in Napa nearly every weekend. “He was born and raised there. With all that’s been developed, I think it’s gradually going to turn into a San Francisco-ish sort of thing where everything’s run up against each other. It really has changed.”
Today, Napa is synonymous with Michelin-starred restaurants, trophy bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and $175 mud baths. And though pieces of the area’s bucolic beginnings are still present — the French Laundry is housed in a 1900-era stone
building, for example — the place is evolving into a land of extravagance for only the Bay Area’s most wealthy. Nowhere has the change crystallized more clearly than in a new wave of luxury hotel options washing through the area this summer and fall, flooding a market already saturated by premium pampering options.
Take the 2-month-old Vista Collina Resort in south Napa, where a “breakfast in bed” room starts at $744 on some weekends. Or, drive north to St. Helena near Beringer Vineyards where some rooms fetch more than $1,000 nightly at Las Alcobas, a “Luxury Collection Hotel” from Marriott.
More opulence is easy to find around the valley. At Francis House, a boutique hotel that opened in early September in Calistoga, rooms start at $355 per night; at Hotel Villagio, which opened recently at the Estate Yountville, a room can run you $995 on certain weekends. In nearby Sonoma, major renovations are under way at the MacArthur Place Hotel & Spa. When its facelift is completed in early 2019, the food program will be overseen by Geoffrey Zakarian, winner of “Next Iron Chef,” and a “Cabana Suite” for two will run upward of $899 a night.
“Fancy hotels are fine when there’s one or two, but when there’s one on every corner, it’s too much,” Larson says. “In the long run, it’s going to be the ruin of Napa. Development and change is good, but I feel like some of it is out of control.”
Luxury lodging has defined Napa for years — think about the posh resorts at Meadowood, Auberge and Solage, or the five-story Archer Hotel, which opened in downtown last fall. The continuous upscaling of restaurants and lodging makes some locals and outsiders alike wonder about the future of Wine Country. It’s a question that’s similar to what San Francisco has grappled with since the dawn of the second tech boom: Can Wine Country cater to the most well-heeled tourists without pricing out the rest of us?
Kathy Abraham of Fair Oaks recently tried booking a room for an upcoming weekender in October, where her family was meeting in Napa for a cousin’s birthday. Instead, she got sticker shock. The rates she checked through TripAdvisor and directly at hotels including the Embassy Suites ranged from $500 to $700 a night.
The rates for Napa lodging can jump nearly 40 percent during peak travel periods like October’s harvest season, when the average hotel room goes for $346 nightly. Abraham wound up booking at the Comfort Inn in Fairfield, 25 miles away, for closer to $120.
“It was too freaking expensive,” Abraham says about Napa lodging. “We might have stayed two nights if we could find something affordable in Napa. We’re not trying to have a romantic weekend. We were just going to our cousin’s birthday dinner and didn’t want to splurge. We couldn’t possibly afford that.”
Despite anyone’s gripes, business is booming. Fueled by Bay Area tourists with tech money and a rise in wealthy international travelers, the Napa tourism industry brings in nearly $2 billion annually. That’s about double what visitors spend annually in the summer mecca of Santa Cruz.
Napa’s hotel industry has seen an uptick in both overall occupancy and the price of rooms over the past decade. According to the hotel data analyst company STR, Napa County’s hotel occupancy rose from about 64 percent in 2008 to 72 percent in the first eight months of 2018.
The average daily room rate has also climbed, from about $208 in 2008 to $309 now. Guests of the area’s 150 hotels spend an average of $401.59 each day per person, according to Visit Napa Valley, the local tourism bureau. That’s almost twice as much as tourists spent in 2012, when the average visitor spent about $205 per day.
“People are willing to spend, but it’s more the idea that they have a great experience,” says Clay Gregory, president and CEO of Visit Napa Valley. “And there’s so many types of hotels now. There’s luxury properties, but also midrange properties and some easy-to-afford hotels.”
While the growth of luxury tourism brings welcome sales tax revenues, some tensions have developed between locals and developers. A coalition of residents and conservationists tried to block the development of Calistoga Hills Resort over traffic concerns and tree removals. Widespread hotel developments have also led to concerns over water usage in parts of the valley that were hit hard by drought. Meanwhile, letters to the editor in the Napa Valley Register newspaper lament that hotel developments are taking precedence over affordable housing opportunities for workers who drive the area’s wine and hospitality industries.
But the tourists keep coming. Up valley in Calistoga, business is shaping up well for the owners of the Francis House, a boutique bed and breakfast that opened in early September. Housed in the former Calistoga Hospital building that became dilapidated after standing vacant for five decades, the B&B’s prices range from $495 to $695 per night. Richard Dwyer, who runs the hotel with his wife, Dina, describes the original building as “a wart on the ass of Calistoga.” But after the property was transformed with French country architecture, the amenities include heated toilets that open and close automatically and an infrared sauna room.
“We wanted it to be charming, rustic and luxurious, like something you’d find in Europe,” Dina Dwyer says. “It’s grand in a very quiet way.”
So far, about half of the Dwyers’ guests are Bay Area tourists looking for high-end accommodations. The Dwyers have found that many guests are in their 30s and 40s and aren’t looking for an older or more rustic Napa.
“We wanted to have another concept besides a (typical) bed and breakfast,” Dina says. “It’s not an old lady’s house with frilly lace. We wanted to make the bed and breakfast chic again.”
Travelers like Abraham long for that old Napa, when it felt more like a farming community than the epicenter of conspicuous consumption it is now. The views of hillside vineyards in the fall are beautiful and the wines are world-class, but the price of admission is prohibitively steep.
Abraham and her husband “used to go to Napa in the 1970s when we were first married,” she says. “But we don’t go there so much anymore. It’s become very super high-end. It’s a beautiful region, but we’re not going to stay there.”