Wednesday, July 6, 2005 | 11:01 a.m.
UNLV's Harrah College of Hotel Administration is pursuing partnerships with private companies to build a $200 million-plus mini-campus that would include a hotel and conference center, giving hotel operators a "living laboratory" to test new technology.
The goal, college Dean Stuart Mann told the state university system's Board of Regents recently, is to create a "campus within a campus" for the space-crunched hotel college on 10 acres of land nestled at the corner of Flamingo Road and Swenson Avenue. The conceptual plan includes expanding and renovating the current Stan Fulton building into a full conference center with a 185-room hotel attached and a separate restaurant.
South of Swenson Avenue, the campus would also include a new 100,000-square-foot academic center for the hotel college with an additional building for other still-to-be-determined usages, including possible faculty condos, retail space, food services and/or a museum dedicated to the hospitality industry. A flood control wash that currently runs through the land would be turned into a water feature uniting the whole campus, Mann said.
The entire project, which has been christened INNovation Village, would be a "living laboratory" to test out new products, Mann said. Every innovation that may possibly apply to or benefit the hospitality industry could be tested in the village's inn, conference center and restaurant, particularly new technology that controls everything from security to the environment to the key card door locks.
The village would encourage cross-disciplinary involvement from all of UNLV's academic programs in testing the products, Mann said, including science, engineering and fine arts. INNovation Village would pursue a partnership between UNLV and Desert Research Institute, which is across the street from the site, to pursue new energy efficient methods of heating, cooling or lighting a hotel, Mann said.
Hospitality industry leaders both nationally and locally praised the idea.
"I think they are ahead of the curve on doing a project like that," Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel and Lodging Association in Washington, D.C., said. "They're doing a great thing. It's sort of taking the academia and industry and putting them together."
Alan Feldman, vice president for public affairs at MGM Mirage, called it a "fabulous idea." Valerie DeMatties, spokeswoman for Harrah's Entertainment, agreed, saying her company would definitely be involved in the project in some capacity.
Several institutions, such as Cornell University, utilize university-managed hotel and conference facilities to train their students in hotel management, Feldman said. UNLV's expansion of that concept to focus more on product development and testing has not been done yet in the hotel industry but "makes a lot of sense," Feldman said.
He said most of MGM Mirage's hotels and conference centers are too busy to do much product testing on site.
"Often you can't quite take the risk of testing out new technology lest it not work," Feldman said. "The occupancy levels both in hotel and convention centers are so high there is very little margin for error, and error is an important part of building a system that works. So I would say that is a very positive thing, not just for our industry in (Las Vegas) but for the entire industry."
INNovation Village would allow technology developers to test their products in a real-life setting and allow hotel executives to view the new technology in action, said Russell Dazzio, chairman and chief executive officer of R&R Hotel Group.
And students would get to test out technology before it is available to the public.
Products would be evaluated based on whether they reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and increase employee productivity, Dazzio said.
A 1973 alumnus of the hotel college whose company specializes in hotel development, Dazzio served as an adjunct professor at UNLV over the past year. He led a group of graduate and undergraduate hotel administration students through the process of developing the concept for the hotel and conference center. He said he got involved in the project simply by introducing himself to Mann.
The initial objective, Dazzio said, was to help his alma mater develop some new revenue sources in order to pay for a greatly needed new academic center for the hotel college. The college's current main facilities in Beam Hall were designed to serve only about 1,000 students, and the college currently has 2,600 enrolled, Mann said.
UNLV officials are predicting that the new facilities could accommodate 4,000 students and 100 faculty members.
The Stan Fulton building, which houses the International Gaming Institute, serves mainly as a continuing education facility for professionals in the hospitality industry.
But as Dazzio and Mann worked out the feasibility study, they said they realized that it didn't make sense for UNLV to just build a hotel, although the university could certainly use its own facility for visitors. With the Las Vegas Strip in the university's backyard, students already had plenty of opportunities to gain real-life experience in the hospitality industry.
But what students, product developers and the hospitality industry didn't have was a place to test out new ideas and products in a real environment, Dazzio said.
"We have the opportunity of doing something that has never been done and that needs to be done," Dazzio said.
Because his company has been so involved in developing the initial concept, it will not be bidding an any of the future contracts to actually construct or manage the village, Dazzio said. But he will continue to volunteer as an adviser to see the project to fruition.
The feasibility study showed that the whole village would be financial viable, so much so that it would make money for any of the private companies involved in developing and managing the commercial facilities and generate revenue to cover the hotel college's non-state funded costs, Mann said.
A marketing study also showed heavy interest from technology groups, namely Microsoft, Accuvia, Bose, Sony, Nextel, SBC and T-Mobile, in testing their products that the facility.
The response from both the product developers and the industry has been "phenomenal," Dazzio said. At a Hospitality Technology Magazine forum in April at Bellagio, Microsoft's support of the project spurred a flurry of business cards from others interested in participating, Mann and Dazzio said.
"We see this as a way of leveraging what we are already doing in our in-house testing facilities," said Matt Muta, director and industry manager for Microsoft's hospitality and retail division.
Microsoft's hospitality endeavors include developing in-room and media center technology, Muta said, and the company works with others partners who develop business solution technology such as point-of-sale systems.
"It's (UNLV's proposed INNovation Village) is a good opportunity for us to get ahead of the curve in the hospitality industry," Muta said.
Reid Paul, editor-in-chief of Hospitality Technology Magazine, said he was "pleasantly surprised" by how much support UNLV received at the forum.
UNLV's plan is dependent on the cooperation of the technology industry because of the expense of constantly changing out technology in order to test it, Paul said. UNLV will also have to figure out a method for switching technology in a way that won't adversely impact the quality of service for its clientele. It's easy to put in a new Ipod, but difficult to change the air conditioning system.
"The devil for this kind of thing is in the details," Paul said. "It's definitely doable but it is going to take a lot of thought from people in the industry and people at UNLV to make it work well and still be useful to people in the industry."
If UNLV does it right, Paul said, the research aspect of the expansion will take the university and the industry to the "next level."
University regents expressed enthusiasm for the plan, but they will not begin to consider formal approval for any of it until Mann comes back with more fully developed plans.
Mann said he is also pursuing some major donors from the hotel and gaming industries to kick off the project, which will have to be paid with non-state funds. The university is only seeking direct donations for the academic center, which is expected to cost $40 million to $50 million.
Mann said he can't name names yet, but he and Dazzio were both pretty confident that they'll be able to name at least one major donor when the university's capital campaign kicks off in September.
"We've hit no roadblacks, no obstacles are in our path," Mann said. "It's just a matter of putting all the pieces together and raising the money to make it happen."
The $200 million total cost for the campus is only a "pie-in-the-sky estimate," Mann said.
Construction costs can escalate quickly, and the final design for the facilities will depend on what companies ultimately partner with UNLV to build the campus. The university is also still unsure what the planned mixed-use facility on the south end of the proposed campus will include. The proposal will be put out to bid, Mann said.
The hotel college is already consistently ranked first or second in the nation -- with Cornell in the other top spot -- depending on who is doing the ranking, Dazzio said. The expectation is that, if done right, the new village will make the college internationally renowned for hospitality research as well as training, Dazzio said.
"It makes UNLV's Harrah Hotel College in the hospitality industry ... comparable to the way people see Harvard as a law school. It gives them a tangible thing that people can connect to and see this is why this is the greatest college in the world."
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