A new hotel is great news. It means the city is increasing in population or it is just well enough to attract many visitors. But is having a hotel always a good thing?
The game day traffic for Kansas State football games is already frustrating for the more than 50,000 fans that fill Bill Snyder Family Stadium during the season. The new Bluemont Hotel not only adds to the congestion that gridlocks Manhattan on those days, but also adds more cars on the Kansas interstate.
According to Jim Muller, director of facilities, Bill Snyder Family Stadium can hold 1,000 cars in general parking. There are 4,800 more spots for East and West stadiums, but both have permit entry required for only reserved people who are members of the Ahearn Fund. The Bluemont Hotel alone includes a garage in the back that includes 125 cars, which potentially adds 10 percent more to the already-packed stadium lots.
There are already many hotels in the Manhattan area such as Parkwood Inn and Suites, The Holiday Inn, Comfort Suites, Regency Inn and Quality Inn just to name a few. The Bluemont Hotel does have a parking garage behind the hotel that can fit up to 125 cars, which does not create any further problems with parking near the Aggieville area. However the new hotel is just bad for smaller businesses in Manhattan.
“A new hotel could always be a problem because that takes many of the customers and spreads it out even more,” Suzan Kamm, manager at Best Western, said. “It just becomes a dog-eat-dog type of competition between all of the other hotels.”
The final problem is the issue of environment. According to greenhotelscombined.com, tourists are very likely to over consume resources such as water and energy. In dry regions, hotels consume 116 gallons of water a day. People consume more energy in hotels than they use in the convenience of their own homes. More consumption per person also includes 2.2 pounds of waste. The Bluemont has 112 rooms. Assuming one person stays in each room for one night, the result would create 246.4 pounds of waste.
The city of Manhattan is located in rural Kansas, an area already notorious for its droughts and depleting water supplies. The only water sources are the Kansas River and Tuttle Creek for a city that is home to 56,000 people during the school year. Water consumption is already at a high, and adding another hotel with guests who do not have to worry about the additional water bill just hurts the environment.
The Bluemont Hotel adds stress to game day traffic, provides more competition for smaller hotels in the area, and also increases the chance of tourists hurting the environment. The new hotel does open more rooms for parents visiting their kids or for football games.
However, predicting the events or occasions that require another hotel are very unclear, and are very unlikely in a small college town.
