Bayside Geelong, on the city’s Esplanade overlooking Eastern Beach, has been over a year in the remaking and conducted a soft launch earlier this month, opening for business four days later.
Bayside Geelong has up to five meeting spaces on its first floor, two syndicate rooms/co-working spaces and 79 accommodation rooms and suites, plus a restaurant and private dining room, a gym, a lap pool and underground parking.
The hotel is a 10-minute seaside stroll to the under-construction convention centre which is set to open next July.
As part of its transformation, the former Choice Hotels Quality-branded property has been upgraded to an Ascend, part of Choice’s top-tier properties.
Brought on board 12 months ago to help guide the property towards its goal of being a business events offering was former chair of Business Events Victoria and former manager of Geelong’s convention bureau, Mark Day, who invited micenet to participate in the soft launch.
Also at the event were industry colleagues from the City of Greater Geelong, Visit Victoria and the local Chamber of Commerce.
On arrival at the hotel, we were presented with an A3 sheet of activities that started with “please shower at 6.15pm”. It was not about the body odour from a hard Friday at work: this was a serious pressure test of how well the showers performed and the resultant temperature when all invitees were asked to get in (their own) shower at the same time.
At 7.30pm we pressure-tested the ground floor restaurant, the private dining room, its staff and the kitchen.
When the food was a bit slower than expected we were shouted a round of drinks and one drink later the food did arrive, along with the executive chef, Johnathan Hornsey. He proceeded to carve and serve our main meal to the nine of us assembled in the private dining room. It was explained to us that this personalised “Feed Me” service by the chef would be a standard offering in the private dining room.
Day also explained that stage two of the hotel’s transformation will turn the front of the property into a number of apartments and a “destination restaurant” overlooking the sea and helmed by the British-born Hornsey.
The next day we inspected the pre-function space on level one, with its own kitchen, bar and an outdoor terrace. The main space seats 156 in theatre and divides in two, each with oval tables able to seat 40, or alternatively 70 in theatre. Another room on this level suits 78 in theatre and can be divided into three spaces for 26 in theatre each.
By the end of the overnight stay in a 38m2 studio apartment, I had ticked nearly all the boxes – from the fridge (cold), to the kettle (fast), the lights (on), the Wi-Fi (it connects), curtains open (sea view) and the huge TV at the end of the king bed (great picture).
So I asked Day how he felt it went.
“We definitely felt the impact of everyone in the shower at about the same time, but it was a relatively easy adjustment back of house to be fully ready to open,” he said.
He believes the staff did a great job, as did the kitchen, given that it would be less likely to have every guest arrive at exactly the same time.
