Published December 2005

Hilton’s services
complement flight center

Snohomish County Business Journal/JOHN WOLCOTT The new Hilton Garden Inn adjacent to the Future of Flight Center and Boeing Tour facility provides luxury rooms for tourists and business guests, caters banquets at the flight center and operates the center’s cafe.

By John Wolcott
SCBJ Editor

The Hilton Garden Inn at Paine Field, adjacent to the new Future of Flight Center and Boeing Tour facility that is due to open Dec. 17, has already been open for several weeks but plans its grand opening early next year to let the flight center be the first to enjoy the spotlight.

Even with a quiet, “soft” opening, the hotel’s fresh looking architecture, spacious parking, lobby grill and quality furnishings make its own loud statement. Sitting on a hilltop adjacent to Highway 526 that links I-5 and the Mukilteo Speedway, the hotel has an obvious quality appeal that is already filling rooms.

Both projects complement each other, with the flight center attracting aviation executives and an anticipated 250,000 visitors each year who are expected to visit the center for tours of the Boeing airliner assembly plant. That’s more than double the 100,000 people who usually tour the plant, making it the most popular tourism destination in the county.

Drawing crowds will help the hotel, but the hotel will be helping the flight center, too, operating its cafe and catering its banquets, conferences and meetings.

The hotel also offers an exercise room and an indoor pool, plus 2,400 square feet of its own meeting space, as well as wired and wireless Internet connections throughout the hotel. Guest rooms also have both wired and wireless Internet, plus in-room faxes and printing capability, speakerphones and work desks, plus a refrigerator, microwave, coffee maker and 26-inch high-definition television, all designed to cater to the corporate traveler, which the Hilton staff expects to provide 75 percent of its business.

“This area needs this kind of luxury hotel. ... It will bring more people to Snohomish County,” said Manager Lorenzo Flores, who previously managed the highly rated, high-rise Holiday Inn Express in Seattle and who was assistant manager of the Quality Inn at 128th Street in south Everett when it was a Holiday Inn.

Flores said the hotel includes 13 suites, including a 1,100-square-foot executive condo on the top floor of the four-story facility.

One of the hotel’s specialties is serving the Asian trade, which Flores expects to see increasing in this area, particularly tourists and visiting Asian airline executives.

“We even offer an authentic Japanese breakfast and special Asian menus for banquets,” he said, adding that the hotel has hired an Asian assistant chef to train the staff and also translate for guests. The staff even includes a Japanese-speaking cashier.

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