With four hotels either underway or recently completed downtown, and others planned, Buffalo’s largest hotel seems to be in a bit of trouble. The 486-room hotel at Church and Lower Terrace has a 2 out of 5 star rating on Yelp. A sampling of comments:
“The Adams Mark is a great location, and not such a bad place if you have low to modest expectations.“
“In reality, it wasn’t a miserable place to stay–so long as your expectations are quite low to begin with.“
“The rooms were nice and clean, but nothing special.“
“I’ve stayed at the Adams Mark a couple of times now and I’m just not impressed.“
“The hotel staff was very nice, but the rooms and fitness center looked like they haven’t been updated in a long time.”
And then this in a comment about the Hilton Garden Inn opening:
I work at the Adam’s Mark, and I can tell you that we survive mostly because of a) convention business and groups using the ballroom and meeting rooms, and b) fat contracts with Southwest Airlines, JetBlue and a few others to put up pilots and flight attendants for the night – other hotels don’t have vacancies on a consistent enough basis to offer that kind of service.
Sadly, the owners are trying like hell to unload the property and are, basically, not putting a cent into it beyond what they absolutely have to avoid code violations. FFS two of our four elevators are down with no plans to service them. It’s a horror show now, but hopefully the new owners (whenever they materialize) will whip the place into shape.
The hotel, which opened in 1980 as a Hilton, has traded hands a number of times in recent years. San Francisco-based Chartres Lodging Group, LLC purchased the hotel for $18.63 million in 2008. It had been owned by HBE Corp. since 1998 when it paid $15 million for the property. The Buffalo location was one of five Adam’s Mark hotels purchased by Chartres Lodging in a package deal.
Chartres sold the property to Corning-based Visions Hotels in February 2009 for $7.5 million. A promised $10 million makeover and conversion to a Crowne Plaza in 2011 was never completed. Visons Hotels owns a number of hotels in central New York and locally also owns the Comfort Suites hotel at Main and Chippewa, a Hampton Inn in East Aurora, and in August purchased a Holiday Inn in Amherst.