Grand Hotel To Test Early Spring Market With March Opening

By Ryan Schlehuber

Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island will open some of its rooms this year on March 1, the earliest in its 119 years of business. The early opening assures the hotel it gets a full quota of foreign workers to staff its operations this summer, but, according to hotel president Dan Musser III, it will also provide its guests with an opportunity to visit Mackinac Island before summer.

The early opening was announced in January, and by February 9, more than 250 rooms had been booked between March 1 and May 5.

March can be the month of the Great Ice Bridge and a season of wonderful snowfalls and pristine cross-country ski adventures on Mackinac, but it can also be drab and gray and bitter cold, and nobody is really going to know what it is until it gets here. March and the even-more-unpredictable April at Grand Hotel will be an adventure, for sure, both for the guests and for the few employees brought in to serve them.

“I’m sure shoveling snow will be a little foreign to our employees’ routine of opening the hotel,” said Mr. Musser, pondering the new routine. “The main difficulty will be to make aware to guests the type of experience they will encounter.”

That will include a behind-the-scenes tour of the hotel while in winter storage and a glimpse of everyday life on Mackinac Island during the winter months, when the 500-or-so local citizens go about their daily business.

Open at the Grand will be the 42-room Millennium Wing on the east end, constructed in 2001, and the four-bedroom Masco Cottage, which was opened in 2003. The rooms can be rented for $119 per night, with continental breakfasts included; the Masco Cottage, which has its own kitchen and living room, is available to families or small groups for $500 per night.

Guests can eat meals at the hotel’s Jockey Club at the Grand Stand, at the golf course across from the Millennium Wing, or at the Mustang Lounge and Village Inn Restaurant downtown, which are open all winter.

Hotel concierge and historian Bob Tagatz will run the hotel during March and April and offer tours that will take guests through the hotel, showing them the side of the hotel that many tourists usually do not see.

The Grand, if weather permits, will also dust off its antique sleigh for guests, the same sleigh that was used in the famous 1947 film, “This Time For Keeps,” starring Jimmy Durante and Esther Williams.

The main reason for the hotel’s early start is that the hotel needed to apply for work visas for its more than 300 foreign national workers earlier than usual. Increased competition for temporary work visas and more strict enforcement of the national quota meant the hotel needed to get its application in before the quota was filled.

United States immigration laws require that employers apply for seasonal work visas no sooner than 120 days before employees must start work. Last year, some northern Michigan employers were left without their foreign national workforce because the quota was reached before they could even apply.

Grand Hotel has recruited workers from around the world for more than 30 years to fill some of the 550 jobs required for operation. This year it has hired 220 Jamaicans and just under 100 Mexicans, plus several Austrian chefs and several Australian teamsters and stable hands.

Mr. Musser said there was concern that if the necessary work permits for these workers were not applied for until early February to accommodate the hotel’s traditional early May opening, national quotas for temporary work visas might already be filled for the season.

The solution was to open earlier.

He said 25 employees, some of them foreign nationals, will be on hand to open the hotel March 1, but the majority of the hotel staff will not arrive until sometime in April to get the rest of the hotel open on May 6.

The new, insulated Millennium Wing provided the opportunity to jump-start the season.

“Ever since we opened the Millennium Wing, we have thought about trying an early opening,” said Mr. Musser. “The fact that it was added on to the hotel and has separate utility connections means we can open it and the Masco Cottage independently of the rest of the hotel.”

Getting the water and electricity running shouldn’t be a problem, said Mr. Musser. Providing access to the new wing without opening the rest of the hotel, however, may be a bit tricky.

The east end of the hotel’s lower lobby will be used as the main entrance, complete with a temporary front desk, at least until May. From there, guests can use the hotel’s new elevator to get to the heated corridor that leads to the new wing.

The Masco cottage will be easy to prepare, since it was formerly the home of foreman Frank Bloswick, and the Jockey Club also has been opened in winters to serve the large work crews remodeling the hotel over the years. The facility served meals to at least 100 construction workers during winter construction of the two new additions to the hotel in 2001 and 2003.

If Arnold Line isn’t running between St. Ignace and Mackinac Island in March, guests can fly to the Island aboard Great Lakes Air from the Mackinac County Airport in St. Ignace.

“I’m very optimistic about this coming summer and I’m excited for our March 1 opening,” Mr. Musser said. “March through April is going to be an interesting and exciting experiment. I’m looking forward to it.”