At least one Syracuse-area hotel isn’t booked for Parents Weekend.

Then again, it hadn’t even been booked for existence until officials at the Pyramid Companies, the management group overseeing construction of Destiny USA, broke ground two weeks ago on a new 1,300-room hotel that marked the official start of supermall construction.

The hotel, expected to be the state’s largest outside New York City, will likely relieve the difficulty facing Syracuse University parents who can’t easily find travel accommodations for one of the school’s biggest weekends.

“As it stands right now, Parents Weekend and graduation are always sold out,” said Cindy Gambell, community relations manager of the Syracuse Conventions & Visitors Bureau. “This will allow parents who used to stay in outside counties to be closer to Syracuse.”

Syracuse has 6,300 travel rooms, but that figure should rise drastically with the addition of this hotel and several others slated to be built in the same area.

Such plans come as welcome news for SU, which routinely attracts 5,500 parents and relatives for Parents Weekend, the largest of any annual school event. The event, scheduled this year for Nov. 8-10, becomes even bigger when coupled with an SU football game, as is the case this year.

“It’s the biggest time of our year,” said David Heymann, general manager of the 235-room Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel and Conference Center. “The demand is very great.”

That demand provides an ideal opportunity for local hotels and motels to drastically increase prices for the weekend event.

The Sheraton, for example, normally has rates for $109 per night. On Parents Weekend, though, those rates increase to $230 an evening, with a minimum two-night stay.

“You can’t really complain about price gouging — it’s something that is good business, but it is still a problem that we incur,” said Colleen O’Connor Bench, director of the Syracuse University Parents Office. “The hope is that if the market is suddenly flooded with more hotels than we need, price gouging won’t be as common.”

Although the first Destiny hotel doesn’t figure to open until late next year, some other area hotels are already planning for the increased competition.

“They’re planning to build something that is about five times the size of this hotel,” Heymann said. “Certainly, the building of this new hotel will change the landscape.”

The building, the first among a skyline of hotels, is penciled to stand between 375 and 400 feet, facing the Onondaga lakefront and bordering the Destiny complex, Pyramid executive Michael Lorenz said.

A name for the V-shaped building has yet to be determined, but Lorenz guessed that all details would be finalized within the next few months.

“This will be a part of the most remarkable transformation Central New York has ever seen,” Lorenz said at the groundbreaking. “Nothing this great happens without a lot of hard work, without some controversy and without some obstruction along the way.”

Most planning now behind, Pyramid will face a period when the hotel is complete but the area of attraction is still a work-in-progress. If the hotel is finished for next year’s Parents Weekend — something that will depend on both construction progress and the date for the 2003 event — then SU parents will quickly benefit.

“Right now, a lot of people end up staying much farther away — Cortland, for example, which is a 30-45 minute drive,” Bench said. “That discourages a lot of parents who would otherwise attend. When people first started talking about Destiny, we knew almost right away more hotels could really benefit the school.”

Published on November 7, 2002 at 12:00 pm