Rising Airport Traffic Boosts Cheektowaga: FOCUS: BUILDING BOOM

By Thomas J. Dolan, The Buffalo News, N.Y.

Dec. 1–Ghislaine Cloutier of St. Catharines, Ont., knows a bargain when she sees one.

Cloutier figures she saved almost $400 recently on air fare for herself and her two children by driving across the border and staying overnight at a hotel near Buffalo Niagara International Airport before catching a flight to California. “I think it’s a great deal,” she said.

And a good deal for Canadians is quickly becoming a good deal for Cheektowaga.

As many as six hotels could be built in the airport area between now and 2010, builders and town officials say, adding up to as much as $34 million to the town’s tax rolls.

“We’ve never had this much value outside of the Galleria, and it’s all clustered around the airport,” Cheektowaga Chief Building Inspector Thomas J. Adamczak said. “It will certainly strengthen what’s out there now.”

Adamczak described three of the developments as still in the talking stages, but construction is beginning on two others; and town officials have been assisting a developer who’s looking for a site for a sixth hotel.

A big reason behind the building boom is people like the Cloutiers who come here for cheap airline fares and easier departures, developers say.

There are no hard figures yet, but Adamczak also said the growing numbers of Canadian travelers, a stronger Canadian dollar and disadvantages for travelers at Toronto’s airport could well increase business for airport- related companies.

“It’s a great thing for Cheektowaga,” Supervisor-elect Mary F. Holtz said. The hotel projects include:

–A Fairfield Inn and a Marriott Courtyard, with a combined 270 rooms. They are under construction east of Burgess Boulevard, a new road off Genesee Street. Builders also have talked about building a third hotel on the property, but no decision has been made, said Eric Recoon, vice president of development for Benderson Development.

–An eight-story, 147-room, upscale Aloft Hotel proposed by Manga LLC, a Mississauga, Ont., developer. Manga is seeking rezoning and other approvals for the site, about three acres at the end of Burgess Boulevard. Area residents oppose the design, saying the building is too tall and would loom over their homes. Discussions are continuing.

–A proposed 140-room hotel behind Carl Paladino’s existing Days Hotel at 4345 Genesee. Paladino is now building several retail buildings on the site and has made allowances for a new hotel, but that part of the project is in a “holding pattern” for now.

–A new hotel, possibly located to the south of the Holiday Inn Express Buffalo Airport. The site, at Genesee and the Kensington Expressway, is owned by Ciminelli Development. Town officials said they have received inquiries about a proposal, but a spokeswoman for the company said she had no information about a new hotel.

If all six of the proposed hotels are built, they would create about 800 rooms and add an estimated $24 million to $34 million to Cheektowaga’s property tax rolls.

However, Cheektowaga lost about 300 rooms when the former Executive Inn was razed, meaning the six hotels would represent an addition of 500 new rooms in the area.

In comparison, there are about 8,500 hotel rooms in all of Erie County, including about 1,000 in downtown Buffalo and Allentown.

Lower air fares here

Canadians, including “park and fly” travelers like the Cloutiers, now make up about 30 percent of the passengers at the Buffalo airport, estimates C. Douglas Hartmayer, a spokesman for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority.

To meet the demand, the NFTA has hired Cannon Design to redesign security gates. The authority is considering building new airline departure gates.

In addition to cheap air fares, Canadians interviewed for this article say they like the lower costs and the convenience of using Buffalo’s airport. Canadians and their travel agents also say Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and other airports north of the border are subject to steep “departure taxes” and are more congested than the Buffalo airport.

“It’s just crazy what they’re charging,” said Anna Miklea, a travel agent with Belmont Travel in Hamilton, Ont.

Miklea said she is booking more flights out of Buffalo these days because she can often find lower prices than those on the Internet.

And she has no qualms about not using a Canadian airport.

“We have to support our customers, too,” she said.

There’s more good news, too, because some Canadians who “park and fly” from Buffalo are leaving time for a shopping spree in the Buffalo area before returning home.

A vacation in the sun, capped off with several days of shopping in Buffalo, is exactly what Ruth Lambert and Jan Gillen of Whitby, Ont., are planning with their families. The two women were interviewed during a recent shopping trip to Buffalo area malls.

Lambert and her family have been using the Buffalo airport for trips to Florida for the past five years — each time leaving Whitby, which is east of Toronto, and driving across the Toronto metropolitan area on the day before their flight.

Their reward is 70 percent off the cost of using Toronto’s airport, she said. Round-trip fares from Buffalo to Florida on budget airlines can cost as little as $300, but would cost $1,000 in Toronto, not counting parking charges of up to $50 or more per week at some airport hotels in Toronto.

Lambert’s friend, Jan Gillen, was making her first trip to Buffalo. But the two families are expecting to return here in March to catch a vacation flight to Puerto Rico. And Lambert said they are also planning to set aside several days for shopping in Buffalo before they head back home.

Not everyone cheering

Not everyone is cheering about the Cheektowaga hotel boom.

Convention and Visitors Bureau President Rich Geiger said the new hotels may be good for Cheektowaga today, but says he wonders about the future.

“What happens two years from now or five or 10 years from now?” he said.

Geiger maintains the only way to ensure the future success of the hotels is to attract conventions and other business from outside the area. And to do that, he said, the convention bureau needs the revenues from the county’s bed tax.

But Supervisor-elect Holtz rejected such concerns, saying that Cheektowaga and its hotels will likely weather future downturns in the U.S. economy because many of the advantages that prompt Canadians to fly out of Buffalo are not likely to change soon, such as Canada’s departure taxes.

“I don’t see a downside to it,” Holtz said. And neither do the Canadians.

Cloutier, an administrative assistant in a St. Catharines realty firm, said she used the Internet to check out 13 hotels near the Buffalo airport. She chose the Days Hotel because it was one of the closest to the airport.

After accounting for the hotel bill, using the Buffalo airport was less expensive and “a lot less hassle” than flying out of Toronto, she said.

Her package at the Days Hotel in Cheektowaga included free breakfasts, free shuttle bus to the airport and two weeks of free parking for her car.

“I used to work in California, but the kids have never been there,” she said.

Another highlight of the vacation will be a visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. “Everybody’s excited,” she said.

And others are watching to see if the excitement lasts.

“They are coming down in droves,” Paladino said. “And as long as that dollar continues to sink, it’s going to be better for us in Buffalo.”

tdolan@buffnews.com

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