Sip n' Dip, Great Falls, Montana - General Tiki

SDT Sweet Daddy Tiki Tiki Socialite Edmonton Joined: Jul 20, 2003 Posts: 1113	SDT Sweet Daddy Tiki Posted posted on Fri, Aug 3, 2007 4:28 PM How To Build Business With A 'Whirly-Bird' Pad by Robert P. Hammond (Tourist Court Journal, Vol. 29, No. 5, February 1966) With a lifetime in the construction industry and twelve years' experience operating a motel, Edgar O'Haire knew exactly what to do when he decided to build a 75-room motel in Great Falls, Montana, and the structure he created provides a living guidebook for others contemplating building or remodeling. The traveling men chatting in motel lobbies say he put into the O'Haire motel more things that they want than most and prove they mean it by giving him a year around occupancy rate of better than 90%. O'Haire became a motel owner accidentally. He was strictly a contractor until one winter he decided to build a motel to keep his crew busy over the slack season, planning to run it as a sideline with a hired manager. From this venture, he gained such a good opinion of the motel business that he decided to build a new motel in Great Falls, Mont., which he would run himself. The experience he had gained in both the construction and motel businesses convinced him he was particularly qualified for the venture. O'Haire had kept comment cards in the rooms of his Shelby Motel and these gave him a lot of ideas. Guests wrote about their likes and dislikes, and he amplified these thoughts through conversations with them. "In planning the Great Falls motel, I used two guidelines," O'Haire said, "my experience in operating the Shelby motel and my own taste and preferences. I figured that most people would like what I like and it seems to be true. For instance, I want to be able to go to the bar or the cafe, or swimming or to a meeting without having to put on a raincoat or chasing through a snowbank. This is an advantage that hotels have over most motels. I wanted my motel to have it, too. But I also wanted to include the best features of the motels." O'Haire Manor is owned by a corporation founded by O'Haire in which he owns 60% of the stock and the balance is owned by 400 investors. "The big advantage of motels over hotels is the availability of parking, so ample parking was a must. I planned the layout so that the rooms would be as close to the garages as possible, too. None of our rooms is more than 70 feet from its parking space. "Convenient parking is one of our biggest sales features but, strangely, it is where many try to economize. Building on expensive land (as we did with a downtown location), many shortsighted operators keep adding rooms at the expense of the parking lot, which gets smaller and smaller. The parking problem then gets larger and larger. In our case, instead of having 50% parking like most downtown motels, we have two for one. We can accommodate 150 cars, more than half in covered storage. "This gives us a really exclusive feature in Great Falls because the only public parking garage in town recently was torn down. The fact that our garage is covered and heated as well as convenient makes this one of our chief sales tools. The upper floors are open on the inside end, but there is 14,000 feet of radiant heating in the downstairs garage floor and the rising heat warms the slab above. In the winter, we've often got the only dry parking lot in town. Think what this means to our guests. In the dead of winter, when the business is the slimmest and when it's 40 degrees below zero outside, they can put their cars inside and keep them warm and dry. How many people do you think are going to want to leave their car outside in the snow and ice, or even in unheated garages, when they know we have this facility available for them? "That's our whole philosophy - make life as comfortable and convenient as possible for our guests. That's why I insisted that a bar and restaurant were musts. Some of the chains disagree, but I don't think I could get along without them. I've had guests tell me that if it wasn't for the bar and cafe they wouldn't stay here no matter how nice the rooms were because they say, 'When we're away from home, we're lonesome. We don't want to sit in a room all by ourselves. We want to go out where we can see people and activity, and the nice thing here is that we can do it without even putting on a hat and coat'." Tied in with the O'Haire bar, and affording a part of its entertainment, is the indoor swimming pool. A large window behind the bartender's back looks right into the tank so the guests at the counter or the tables can watch the swimmers. The tank is both heated and covered, another item O'Haire considers a major feature. "I feel that the investment the average motel makes for a swimming pool to use in the summer isn't really justified in this area. After all, our tourist season lasts only 60 days. But an indoor pool helps us create business in the winter when we need it most. It brings families taking winter holidays or weekends, so our pool is pulling business all year around and working 365 days a year instead of 60. We feature it in our advertising, saying, 'Come and spend the weekend and bring the family. While you do your Christmas shopping, let the kids swim in the pool. Let our swimming pool be your baby sitter.' I think it's a real success. It doesn't bring a lot of people but it brings a family or two a day and in the winter this is significant." Carrying the convenience features into the more exotic realm, O'Haire also installed a helicopter landing pad on the roof of the motel. It proved more practical than it sounds. "At the time I got the idea, we had several helicopter pilots from the missile base living here," O'Haire said. "The building is structurally strong enough to hold the pad so I asked the government to make a survey as to its suitability (the guide slope has to be flat with a minimum of obstructions). Everything seemed alright, so they gave us the approval and we built the pad. After that, these fellows in the missile program used to fly in and out of here two and three times every day. They'd even come in for awhile to get a drink or stop by on their way someplace to get cigarettes. They are all gone now, but we still have use for the helicopter pad. Several nearby farmers have helicopters and they make this their headquarters. Even if they just come in for a day's shopping and don't stay here we're glad to let them use the landing area because it is good advertising for the motel. When the helicopters come in and light, everyone in town knows it and thinks about the O'Haire motel." Because Montana is a country of great extremes in temperature, O'Haire stressed climate control in the rooms. Hot water circulates through coils in the winter and in the summer, chilled water is sent through. Each guest can regulate the climate in his own room by setting the Minneapolis Honeywell automatic thermostat. All rooms are heated or cooled by American-Standard Remotaire units, Type 30, and a 60-ton Carrier chiller. Natural gas is the fuel used for heating. Combined with the automatic heat and air conditioning is another feature unusual in a motel of this size - every window is insulating glass (Thermopane). In spite of the tremendous extra expense of installing insulated windows, O'Haire feels it was really worth the difference. There is much less draft in the rooms so they are more comfortable, and the double panes with the air space between saves a lot of time and effort in cleaning since they are not soiled by condensate. The insulating glass also diminishes outside traffic noise, O'Haire said, and eliminating this, too, has been a fetish with him. The cores of all the concrete blocks are filled with sand to provide a maximum deadening of sound transmission as well as provide additional fireproofing. O'Haire has made this an important advertising feature. During the November elections, he ran a photograph in the local newspaper showing a workman pouring sand into the concrete blocks and under it put a headline, "Especially good for politicians . . . the loser in the election could go behind this sand-filled wall and cry away the blues without fear of being heard. This is true of all the walls which separate rooms in the new 75-room O'Haire Manor." Another sound conditioning feature overlooked by many without a knowledge of construction, O'Haire said, is control of water noises. The O'Haire Manor uses oversize piping so that there is no noisy rush of water when someone takes a shower. Reducing valves cut the pressure back to about 40 lbs. and further cut down on the water noise possibility. As O'Haire put it, "I know from experience that pipe noise can be really annoying." Water is heated by a group of five Day and Night fast recovery water heaters. Water is softened by a Bruner water softener with a capacity of 400,000 grains per generation. Even the furniture in the rooms was designed and built by O'Haire. He made solid racks with plenty of room to hold big suitcases. He also filled the room with many other conveniences. For instance, each room has not one telephone, but two. It not only has television and hi-fidelity radio, but there is an extra high-fi speaker in the bathroom so the guest can enjoy the music while he takes his bath, or can listen to the news in the morning while he shaves. There are complete push-button controls alongside the bed where he can control the television, radio and lights. All baths are equipped with American-Standard fixtures. All washbasins are extra large, and toilets are wall-hung for cleanliness and ease of housekeeping. Each bath has both a tub and shower. Each room even has an ironing board for convenient touch-up pressing. O'Haire did a great deal of research on motel sites before building. He decided downtown was best in spite of higher land costs. "A downtown location has several advantages, in my opinion," O'Haire said. "It is handy for your guests as long as you have ample parking and we do. It is a competitive advantage which can be critical when the competition is really tough. Statistics indicate occupancy is usually best in the downtown locations and that they are the last to suffer when travel slacks off. In addition, the insurance companies consider downtown sites as better risks because they have maximum fire and police protection." Insurance costs figured prominently in O' Haire's planning and the building was constructed with fire safety, soundproofing and minimum maintenance in mind. The major material is concrete block (Treasure-lite) but decorative brick covers some exterior areas, and the front of the motel is faced with "Montana Travertine," a stone with warm colors, quarried in Yellowstone Park. Across the entire front, above the stone, a metal grill highpoints the decor and again exemplifies the help O'Haire got from his own knowledge of construction. He had seen similar grills on motels in California, liked them and got quotes on them. He decided the bids were all too high and that he would make it himself. So he ordered the raw material, worked out a pattern, built the dies and jigs and made his own for a fraction of the quoted prices. Along the side street, the motel has a half-block-long wall. O'Haire wanted some bright colors to relieve the monotony of the wall expanse. He selected a series of twelve panels, each representing a sign of the zodiac and with the help of his wife, also planned the design and the color scheme. Designed particularly for the convenience of the management and the employees is a custom-built room status board. This is located at the reception desk and portrays, in colored lights, the room occupancy and condition. This, too, is O'Haire's own development. Because he felt the commercial models then available did not have enough information, he designed his own with the extra data he wanted. This included repeating the light sequence outside the individual rooms. Blue is for holdover; amber shows the room is cleaned up ready to rent; green shows that it is rented; red that it is a check-out with the room in an incomplete status. When the maid is working in a room, she plugs in a jack which flashes a light on the office board so that the desk knows exactly where she is and how long she's in any one room. Also, through the color of the light, the maid knows the status of the room without calling the desk or disturbing the guest. "We had some real trouble getting the electronics worked out on this system," O'Haire said. "The first three circuits were easy but the fourth one really threw us. I took the thing to experts all over trying to get the mechanism figured out without much luck. Finally, a friend of mine (a telephone man) sat down and in about three minutes drew out a sketch and put in the relay with a couple of other gadgets that simplified the whole procedure." Reviewing his operation of his "model motel," O'Haire feels there aren't many major changes he would make if he built again although he is always modifying and improving, particularly the recreation areas. He feels the theories embodied in O'Haire Manor have been proved in practice and doesn't hesitate to recommend them to others.

How To Build Business With A 'Whirly-Bird' Pad

by Robert P. Hammond

(Tourist Court Journal, Vol. 29, No. 5, February 1966)

With a lifetime in the construction industry and twelve years' experience operating a motel, Edgar O'Haire knew exactly what to do when he decided to build a 75-room motel in Great Falls, Montana, and the structure he created provides a living guidebook for others contemplating building or remodeling. The traveling men chatting in motel lobbies say he put into the O'Haire motel more things that they want than most and prove they mean it by giving him a year around occupancy rate of better than 90%.

O'Haire became a motel owner accidentally. He was strictly a contractor until one winter he decided to build a motel to keep his crew busy over the slack season, planning to run it as a sideline with a hired manager. From this venture, he gained such a good opinion of the motel business that he decided to build a new motel in Great Falls, Mont., which he would run himself. The experience he had gained in both the construction and motel businesses convinced him he was particularly qualified for the venture. O'Haire had kept comment cards in
the rooms of his Shelby Motel and these gave him a lot of ideas. Guests wrote about their likes and dislikes, and he amplified these thoughts through conversations with them.

"In planning the Great Falls motel, I used two guidelines," O'Haire said, "my experience in operating the Shelby motel and my own taste and preferences. I figured that most people would like what I like and it seems to be true. For instance, I want to be able to go to the bar or the cafe, or swimming or to a meeting without having to put on a raincoat or chasing through a snowbank. This is an advantage that hotels have over most motels. I wanted my motel to have it, too. But I also wanted to include the best features of the motels." O'Haire Manor is owned by a corporation founded by O'Haire in which he owns 60% of the stock and the balance is owned by 400 investors. "The big advantage of motels over hotels is the availability of parking, so ample parking was a must. I planned the layout so that the rooms would be as close to the garages as possible, too. None of our rooms is more than 70 feet from its parking space.

"Convenient parking is one of our biggest sales features but, strangely, it is where many try to economize. Building on expensive land (as we did with a downtown location), many shortsighted operators keep adding rooms at the expense of the parking lot, which gets smaller and smaller. The parking problem then gets larger and larger. In our case, instead of having 50% parking like most downtown motels, we have two for one. We can accommodate 150 cars, more than half in covered storage.

"This gives us a really exclusive feature in Great Falls because the only public parking garage in town recently was torn down. The fact that our garage is covered and heated as well as convenient makes this one of our chief sales tools. The upper floors are open on the inside end, but there is 14,000 feet of radiant heating in the downstairs garage floor and the rising heat warms the slab above. In the winter, we've often got the only dry parking lot in town. Think what this means to our guests. In the dead of winter, when the business is the slimmest and when it's 40 degrees below zero outside, they can put their cars inside and keep them warm and dry. How many people do you think are going to want to leave their car outside in the snow and ice, or even in unheated garages, when they know we have this facility available for them?

"That's our whole philosophy - make life as comfortable and convenient as possible for our guests. That's why I insisted that a bar and restaurant were musts. Some of the chains disagree, but I don't think I could get along without them. I've had guests tell me that if it wasn't for the bar and cafe they wouldn't stay here no matter how nice the rooms were because they say, 'When we're away from home, we're lonesome. We don't want to sit in a room all by ourselves. We want to go out where we can see people and activity, and the nice thing here is that we can do it without even putting on a hat and coat'."

Tied in with the O'Haire bar, and affording a part of its entertainment, is the indoor swimming pool. A large window behind the bartender's back looks right into the tank so the guests at the counter or the tables can watch the swimmers. The tank is both heated and covered, another item O'Haire considers a major feature.

"I feel that the investment the average motel makes for a swimming pool to use in the summer isn't really justified in this area. After all, our tourist season lasts only 60 days. But an indoor pool helps us create business in the winter when we need it most. It brings families taking winter holidays or weekends, so our pool is pulling business all year around and working 365 days a year instead of 60. We feature it in our advertising, saying, 'Come and spend the weekend and bring the family. While you do your Christmas shopping, let the kids swim in the pool. Let our swimming pool be your baby sitter.' I think it's a real success. It doesn't bring a lot of people but it brings a family or two a day and in the winter this is significant."

Carrying the convenience features into the more exotic realm, O'Haire also installed a helicopter landing pad on the roof of the motel. It proved more practical than it sounds. "At the time I got the idea, we had several helicopter pilots from the missile base living here," O'Haire said. "The building is structurally strong enough to hold the pad so I asked the government to make a survey as to its suitability (the guide slope has to be flat with a minimum of obstructions). Everything seemed alright, so they gave us the approval and we built the pad. After that, these fellows in the missile program used to fly in and out of here two and three times every day. They'd even come in for awhile to get a drink or stop by on their way someplace to get cigarettes. They are all gone now, but we still have use for the helicopter pad. Several nearby farmers have helicopters and they make this their headquarters. Even if they just come in for a day's shopping and don't stay here we're glad to let them use the landing area because it is good advertising for the motel.

When the helicopters come in and light, everyone in town knows it and thinks about the O'Haire motel."

Because Montana is a country of great extremes in temperature, O'Haire stressed climate control in the rooms. Hot water circulates through coils in the winter and in the summer, chilled water is sent through. Each guest can regulate the climate in his own room by setting the Minneapolis Honeywell automatic thermostat. All rooms are heated or cooled by American-Standard Remotaire units, Type 30, and a 60-ton Carrier chiller. Natural gas is the fuel used for heating. Combined with the automatic heat and air conditioning is another feature unusual in a motel of this size - every window is insulating glass (Thermopane). In spite of the tremendous extra expense of installing insulated windows, O'Haire feels it was really worth the difference. There is much less draft in the rooms so they are more comfortable, and the double panes with the air space between saves a lot of time and effort in cleaning since they are not soiled by condensate. The insulating glass also diminishes outside traffic noise, O'Haire said, and eliminating this, too, has been a fetish with him.

The cores of all the concrete blocks are filled with sand to provide a maximum deadening of sound transmission as well as provide additional fireproofing. O'Haire has made this an important advertising feature. During the November elections, he ran a photograph in the local newspaper showing a workman pouring sand into the concrete blocks and under it put a headline, "Especially good for politicians . . . the loser in the election could go behind this sand-filled wall and cry away the blues without fear of being heard. This is true of all the walls which separate rooms in the new 75-room O'Haire Manor."

Another sound conditioning feature overlooked by many without a knowledge of construction, O'Haire said, is control of water noises. The O'Haire Manor uses oversize piping so that there is no noisy rush of water when someone takes a shower. Reducing valves cut the pressure back to about 40 lbs. and further cut down on the water noise possibility. As O'Haire put it, "I know from experience that pipe noise can be really annoying." Water is heated by a group of five Day and Night fast recovery water heaters. Water is softened by a Bruner water softener with a capacity of 400,000 grains per generation.

Even the furniture in the rooms was designed and built by O'Haire. He made solid racks with plenty of room to hold big suitcases. He also filled the room with many other conveniences. For instance, each room has not one telephone, but two. It not only has television and hi-fidelity radio, but there is an extra high-fi speaker in the bathroom so the guest can enjoy the music while he takes his bath, or can listen to the news in the morning while he shaves. There are complete push-button controls alongside the bed where he can control the television, radio and lights. All baths are equipped with American-Standard fixtures. All washbasins are extra large, and toilets are wall-hung for cleanliness and ease of housekeeping. Each bath has both a tub and shower. Each room even has an ironing board for convenient touch-up pressing.

O'Haire did a great deal of research on motel sites before building. He decided downtown was best in spite of higher land costs. "A downtown location has several advantages, in my opinion," O'Haire said. "It is handy for your guests as long as you have ample parking and we do. It is a competitive advantage which can be critical when the competition is really tough. Statistics indicate occupancy is
usually best in the downtown locations and that they are the last to suffer when travel slacks off. In addition, the insurance companies consider downtown sites as better risks because they have maximum fire and police protection."

Insurance costs figured prominently in O' Haire's planning and the building was constructed with fire safety, soundproofing and minimum maintenance in mind. The major material is concrete block (Treasure-lite) but decorative brick covers some exterior areas, and the front of the motel is faced with "Montana Travertine," a stone with warm colors, quarried in Yellowstone Park. Across the entire front, above the stone, a metal grill highpoints the decor and again exemplifies the help O'Haire got from his own knowledge of construction. He had seen similar grills on motels in California, liked them and got quotes on them. He decided the bids were all too high and that he would make it himself. So he ordered the raw material, worked out a pattern, built the dies and jigs and made his own for a fraction of the quoted prices.

Along the side street, the motel has a half-block-long wall. O'Haire wanted some bright colors to relieve the monotony of the wall expanse. He selected a series of twelve panels, each representing a sign of the zodiac and with the help of his wife, also planned the design and the color scheme.

Designed particularly for the convenience of the management and the employees is a custom-built room status board. This is located at the reception desk and portrays, in colored lights, the room occupancy and condition. This, too, is O'Haire's own development. Because he felt the commercial models then available did not have enough information, he designed his own with the extra data he wanted. This included repeating the light sequence outside the individual rooms. Blue is for holdover; amber shows the room is cleaned up ready to rent; green shows that it is rented; red that it is a check-out with the room in an incomplete status. When the maid is working in a room, she plugs in a jack which flashes a light on the office board so that the desk knows exactly where she is and how long she's in any one room. Also, through the color of the light, the maid knows the status of the room without calling the desk or disturbing the guest.

"We had some real trouble getting the electronics worked out on this system," O'Haire said. "The first three circuits were easy but the fourth one really threw us. I took the thing to experts all over trying to get the mechanism figured out without much luck. Finally, a friend of mine (a telephone man) sat down and in about three minutes drew out a sketch and put in the relay with a couple of other gadgets that simplified the whole procedure."

Reviewing his operation of his "model motel," O'Haire feels there aren't many major changes he would make if he built again although he is always modifying and improving, particularly the recreation areas. He feels the theories embodied in O'Haire Manor have been proved in practice and doesn't hesitate to recommend them to others.

Post #323098 by Sweet Daddy Tiki on Fri, Aug 3, 2007 4:28 PM