The new carpet smell is what you notice first when you enter the Causeway Bay Hotel in south Lansing. Then the fresh paint and new wall treatments jump out at you. Soon you realize you’re in the midst of a total hotel makeover.

The Causeway Bay Hotel—formerly the Holiday Inn South Convention Center – is Lansing’s largest hotel complex with 300 rooms and nearly 30,000 square feet of meeting space with room to accommodate up to 1,400 people for conventions.

However, the financial difficulties of the hotel’s previous owners led to several years of neglect to the property. Most local observers agreed that the hotel was in need of some TLC.

Enter the Causeway Bay Hotel Group, a small privately held chain of hotels purchased the hotel property in 2008. The sale closed last December. Since then, the new owners have started renovations that are expected to last into late 2010 and take approximately $4 million to finish.

“The new owners knew it would take a lot of money to complete renovations to bring the property back to where it needs to be. This is a top to bottom redo. Everything will be new,” says Jodi Guild, assistant general manager for the Causeway Bay Hotel in Lansing.

With as many as 60 onsite construction workers at any one time, the hotel already has a new roof and a remodeled courtyard garden area that will be suitable for weddings. New signage has been hung and the landscaping improved. Updates in the hotel’s public areas include new carpet, wall treatments and crystal chandeliers. Even the pool and fitness center have been remodeled and a children’s game room added. In addition, all 300 guest rooms will get new carpet and furniture, wall treatments and bathroom fixtures.

You could say that it has been an exciting and exhausting 12 months since the Causeway Bay Hotel Group took over the property, Guild says. “This is all very exhilarating and we think our guests are going to love it. Guest rooms will feature granite countertops in the bathrooms and crystal chandeliers. We have hired an interior designer to bring everything together. Overall, it’s a very unique design that will really be unlike anything else here in Lansing,” Guild states.

The hotel, just south of Interstate 96 on Cedar Street in south Lansing, features 12 suites and 16 barrier-free rooms and when renovations are finished, will be one of the city’s only full-service hotels allowing pets, Guild said.

The former Holiday Inn South Convention Center had a rich but star-crossed history. The original restaurant at the site was joined by the convention center addition in the early 1970s. Later, the hotel was added around 1983.

The former Holiday Inn South Convention Center, owned by Gordon Long, was very successful for nearly 20 years, drawing large groups for annual conventions, before going through a reorganization in 2001 and then filing for bankruptcy in approximately 2004 before being placed in receivership until last year’s sale.

“There was a time when the Holiday Inn South did exceptionally well. The location is very convenient right off I-96. It’s centrally located in the state and it was very well managed for a long period of time,” says Guild, who has more than 15 years of experience working in the hospitality and hotel industry in mid-Michigan.

The goal for the new ownership group and local managers is to lure back the statewide associations and organizations that stopped coming to the hotel because for a variety of reasons. According to Guild, many of those groups began to meet in places like Novi, Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo.

“We need to regain the trust of those groups. We know that. We expect future visits for them will be much better. We have the space that most large organizations need for meetings and the expertise, whether it’s our exhibition services to the state-of-the-art audio and visual equipment,” Guild says.

The hotel’s busiest time of year is the fall when most large groups plan annual meetings. “October and November is when we have to be busy to be successful. From the groups we have had in this fall, we are hearing that they like what changes they have seen already,” Guild adds.

Nightly rates for business and leisure travelers during ongoing renovations start at $99.99. Guild says, “We want to attain a five-star status but maintain a three-star price. When renovations are complete, we will have an average rate of $129 per night.”

New at the hotel is a renovated lounge named the Valencia Club. The new ownership replaced the Cedar Street Station Sports Lounge. The well-known Hummingbirds Restaurant inside the hotel, which serves American, Continental and local cuisines, will be renovated during the coming year.

Approximately 150 employees work at the full-service hotel. Owners hope to hire additional workers once renovations are complete, Guild added. The Causeway Bay Hotel Group owns and operates a hotel in Muskegon and has others in Alberta, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and Weihai, China.