Hotel Managers

Philadelphia hotels and restaurants gave thanks yesterday for Valentine's Day, George Washington, jazz, and the drug industry. But the city's tax collectors and the purveyors of athletic shoes were singing a much sadder song while tallying the cost as professional basketball's premier marketing event slipped out of Philadelphia's grasp. The region's hotel and restaurant operators saw millions of dollars in revenue disappear when the NBA yesterday canceled its All-Star Game and a host of related events scheduled for the First Union Center in mid-February.

People who have waited until the last hour to find a Philadelphia hotel room on New Year's Eve, hoping to get a big discount from innkeepers eager to rent empty rooms, may be in for a shock. Hotel managers in Center City and other locations across the region said yesterday that they already have sold all or most of their rooms for the weekend, with demand coming from revelers welcoming 2000 and those who need to stay near their businesses in case of Y2K-related computer glitches.

As Philadelphia hotels scramble to build rooms for conventioneers, from the Republican Party to the American Federation of Teachers, northern Delaware is in the midst of a building boom of its own. By fall, four new hotels will be open and a fifth will have expanded in northern New Castle County, increasing the area's capacity by 600 rooms - more than 30 percent. Hoteliers expect business to slump in the short term as supply exceeds demand, though they say corporate travelers will quickly close the gap. "In the early '90s, the demand for hotel growth was just insane," said Christian Coffin, general manager of the Wilmington Doubletree, which is nearing completion of a 90-room expansion and an indoor pool on Route 202 just south of Route 92. "Everyone has dollar signs in their eyes and everybody builds," Coffin said.

Melissa and George Swanson just wanted a place to be alone together. The newlyweds, who live in upstate New York, had been separated two days after their Dec. 18 wedding because George, a sailor, had to report for duty at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. So Melissa Swanson took a 12-hour bus ride to spend New Year's Eve with her husband. Together, they tried that evening to check into the Ramada Inn Conference and Sports Center at 20th Street and Penrose Avenue in South Philadelphia.

MECHANICAL MOTEL. By the end of the year, travelers may be checking into their hotels by utilizing a device similar to a bank automatic-teller machine. Its manufacturers expect Quick-Key to be in use at about 600 U.S. hostelries before 1990, taking money or credit card numbers, issuing keys and receipts, fulfilling requests for special types of rooms, even speaking - via recording - in several foreign languages. The gadget was on display recently at a convention of Best Western hotel managers, many of whom seemed fascinated by its performance and intrigued with its ability to take in guests after hours.

When the long-awaited Philadelphia Marriott opens Friday as one of the country's largest hotels, thousands of hours of preparation by an army of people may be in vain if Antoinette Austin and Ronald Boyd aren't there to help. Austin and Boyd are among the Marriott's 600 new employees, an eager, well- scrubbed group who were winners in a tough competition held last month at state job centers across the city: They were hired out of more than 15,000 applicants. The new employees were swarming over the Convention Center hotel last week for orientation and training sessions.

The 137-room Hampton Inn & Suites Hotel, just off Interstate 95 at the Newtown bypass next to the Lower Makefield Corporate Center, opened last week. "We're targeting the Newtown area first, and then West Trenton and the southern Princeton areas," said Joanne Andrews, director of sales for the new hotel. The Newtown exit is the next to the last one before northbound I-95 crosses into New Jersey from Pennsylvania, making the site close enough to compete with the relatively few hotel rooms just across the river, she said.

By the late 1990s, Philadelphia could be so awash in visitors to the new Pennsylvania Convention Center that three major new downtown hotels will be needed, according to hoteliers and industry consultants. But that's the future. The convention center is not scheduled to open until mid-1993, and the reality for Center City hotel operators today is quite different. With no major conventions planned until the convention center opens, the need to pump up business at Philadelphia's downtown hotels is so desperate that a rare cooperative spirit has emerged among them.

In a disturbing announcement sure to destroy her fans, Kendra Wilkinson has claimed she is devoid of talent. Kendra, 26, who admirably performed a typical job this weekend — acting as host at MGM Grand's Wet Republic pool party — tells People she is aware such appearances don't exactly demand her to deliver Meryl Streep-level work. Instead, the Playboy alumna spends those gigs mocking her exalted place as a celeb. "I never ever see myself as a celebrity or famous, so I poke fun at that," Kendra says.

There's plenty of room at the inns in the Philadelphia suburbs - too much, in fact. Hotel managers who counted on business travelers and family vacationers to fill their rooms are finding that the tourists are staying away in droves. Heady with success a scant few years ago, the hospitality industry in the suburbs of Philadelphia has awakened to its toughest year since the mid-1970s. "You can take a blanket survey and find it's not too much different from the city to the suburbs," said Andrew S. Tod, vice president of sales/ marketing at the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau.