After roughly a year and a half of major repairs, the LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort in Naples, Florida, is essentially back in business.
Hurricane Ian severely damaged parts of the resort when the storm passed over Naples in late September 2022. Repairs started as soon as possible, and the property reopened in phases over the following months.
Hotel real estate investment trust Pebblebrook Hotel Trust owns LaPlaya, having bought it in the first half of 2015. The resort is a combination of two deals, with Pebblebrook buying the LaPlaya Beach Resort and the LaPlaya Beach Club for a combined $185.5 million. Though golf is in its name, Pebblebrook does not own the golf course.
Pebblebrook Chairman and CEO Jon Bortz said in an interview the company put the property through a comprehensive redevelopment that substantially upgraded its quality and gave it a more casual, modern luxury feel. The company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2016 earnings report shows the company initially planned to invest $7.5 million in the property’s renovation.
However, the resort hasn't had much luck with storms.
“We were just completing that redevelopment when we got hit by [Hurricane] Irma, and .... in two of the buildings, we literally had to tear out everything we had just done — and I mean down to the studs and rebuild it completely,” he said of the September 2017 storm.
Pebblebrook lucked out in that repair work from Irma started quickly since the contractor was still on-site.
“They loved it,” Bortz said. “They got paid twice.”
Recovering from Ian
In making its repairs from Hurricane Ian, Pebblebrook essentially reordered the same high-quality furniture and finishes, and it also hardened all of LaPlaya’s buildings against future storms, Bortz said.
The Beach House is a four-story former motel, and the 9-foot-high storm surge from Hurricane Ian destroyed the building’s electrical systems, elevator systems and HVAC systems that were located on the first floor. As part of the repairs, those systems were moved to the upper floors.
The building was the last to be fully repaired, and all of the rooms have been reopened since the first week of March, Bortz said. The company is waiting on final permits for the pools, spa and locker room.
“It's basically done but for punch-list kind of things,” he said.
The resort’s two towers, the 15-story Gulf Tower and the eight-story Bay Tower, reopened earlier in the repair process, Bortz said. The first floors of each tower were severely damaged, and they have been 100% rebuilt. There was minor moisture infiltration on the higher floors, which was dealt with quickly.
The biggest issue was the resort didn’t have permanent power for the first four months after the hurricane, he said. Essentially, the issue was the linemen working for the utility refused to install new transformers for the property because prior work at nearby buildings resulted in fires that injured one of the linemen. They would only complete the work if Pebblebrook installed all new underground electrical wires. That following weekend, the REIT spent $600,000 to dig up the old wires and replace them. Two weeks later, LaPlaya had permanent power again.
The repairs at LaPlaya didn’t suffer from labor availability, Bortz said. The company has been a priority customer for its commercial restoration service, so it had teams ready to go the next day to start mitigating further damage and working on repairs.
There were some equipment delays, however. The elevators at the Beach House were no longer the standard size, he said. Installing custom elevators would take about four years. Instead, to install standard elevators, the elevator stack had to be relocated, which required moving some rooms around.
The work to move the elevator stack commenced while crews waited nine months for the new elevators to arrive. The trick is that the elevator stack is what provides support in multi-story buildings.
“We had to go in inside and structurally support the entire building, and that would allow them to remove the existing elevator stack, which was the structural support for the building, and have shoring in there until the new elevator bank was built that would then support the building,” Bortz said.
Naturally, after any major disaster and recovery, the rebuilding process requires final approval from local governments. The county government was overwhelmed with requests for permits, inspections and approvals, he said. LaPlaya was given priority due to the revenue it generates, but it was still a lengthy process.
Reopening the Resort
Pebblebrook reopened LaPlaya's towers as soon as possible to bring back guests. One of the four pools first opened by the summer of 2023, and the county government had come through and rebuilt the beach the resort sits on. The resort’s restaurants provided limited food service because they were heavily damaged while located on the first and second floors of the Gulf Tower.
Pushing to reopen helped keep staff employed at the resort instead of losing them to other properties or industries, Bortz said. The resort paid staff during the rebuilding effort, even though many didn’t perform their regular jobs. For example, some servers helped with cleaning, painting and other basic tasks while still receiving their normal wages.
LaPlaya’s best month last year was probably in the 30% occupancy range, Bortz said. Rates are off significantly because the property doesn’t have the amenity base, but as more amenities come back online, guests are returning. The resort has a popular beach club and a restaurant that sits on the beach, which, now that it’s recovered, is used extensively by locals.
Demand from group travelers has returned quickly, he said, as the resort hosts several annual group events.
Group demand is relatively close to where it was before Hurricane Ian, and the resort’s demand mix is about 20% to 25% group, Bortz said. Transient demand has been slower to come back, but it’s also a market that has a lot of return guests. There are people who live in the market for several months out of the year, and when their families visit, often they stay in hotels.
Beach club membership grew significantly during the pandemic, even while it was closed, he said.
It’s important to keep in mind that summer is not Florida’s prime season, Bortz said. More leisure guests arrive usually from February through May and then autumn through the end of the year. Group demand is the typical spring and autumn seasons. Most summer demand comes from locals, and that brings lower rates than prime seasons, though they are high because it’s a luxury property.
“But we're really encouraged by the speed at which the customer is coming back,” he said “It's been here a long time, this property. It's really loved by its customer base.”