A new hotel being proposed in Henrietta would add another extended-stay option to the local market.
Indus Hospitality Group is seeking approvals to build the project as it is preparing to open another in the town.
“Hotels are a part of a community's basic infrastructure, sort of like the airport or highway or a convention center,” said Jett Mehta, president and CEO of Indus Hospitality. “A community can't grow business or tourism without them.”
And the push is on to build more locally, with Monroe County open to offering tax incentives to developers like Indus.
Monroe County has about 7,000 hotel rooms, nearly a quarter of which are in Henrietta, according to VisitRochester.
Indus wants to build a four-story, 123-room Woodspring by Choice Hotels off Jefferson Road near Interstate 390. In the coming weeks, Mehta said, the company's 89-room Towneplace Suites by Marriott should open a few miles south off Lehigh Station Road.
The need for more hotel rooms of any type was underscored, county economic development officials said, by the push to land the PGA Championship’s return to Oak Hill Country Club for 2035. Securing that commitment required help from Gov. Kathy Hochul. PGA officials had flagged the area as having inadequate lodging after the tournament was last here in 2023.
Both the Indus properties are extended-stay hotels. Woodspring is considered an economy brand. The first Woodpsring in New York state opened in 2023 in Greece.
The number of extended-stay rooms across the country has quadrupled since 2000, according to the travel trade publication Skift. Here in Monroe County, a separate, CityGate hotel project at Westfall and East Henrietta roads just inside the city of Rochester also will include extended-stay rooms.
One reason extended-stay hotels are gaining traction, specifically, Mehta said, is because “they align especially well with larger mega trends in the country.”
He’s referring to trends in large-scale development, spurred on by major government incentives, for everything from datacenters to manufacturing microchips and dairy products. Those facilities draw on a mobile workforce of skilled tradespeople, engineers, and technicians who travel the country for these projects, be it for construction, set up or training.
“You're correct that we're, you know, starting construction on a hotel, another hotel in Henrietta, on the heels of an opening,” Mehta said. “But we feel Henrietta is probably one of the primary areas of commercial growth in the region — and we like it.”
There are differing views, though, on the path forward.
“I'm not as enthusiastic about new hotels as some others are,” said Henrietta town Supervisor Steve Schultz. “Part of it's because we have a lot of them. I'd be more enthusiastic if they were replacing some of the older, rundown hotels, instead of building new.”
The town has offered its own incentives to do just that, without success. Indus instead is building in an industrial park on Lehigh Station Road, and a giant parking lot on Jefferson Road — in front of a former call center and adjacent Super Crab Juicy Seafood restaurant and bar.
"So it's not like they're removing wooded areas," Schultz said. "But, you know, I will say that the Indus Group does a really good job of building high-end hotels and maintaining them. And that's the problem we have, is that some of these hotels have not been maintained."
Indus is a family-owned, Rochester-based hospitality company that employs 1,200 people at more than 80 properties throughout the region. The company is seeking sales and mortgage tax exemptions, as it did on Lehigh Station Road. The county valued those benefits at nearly $600,000 for the $15 million Jefferson Road project.
