“Total excitement. Fantastic. Finally.” With those words, Flagler Beach Mayor Patti King summed up the response to today’s opening of Compass Hotel by Margaritaville in the heart of Flagler Beach, more than half a century after its three-story predecessor in the same spot closed its door on its last guest.
The land next to Veterans Park had been vacant since, alternating between a parking lot, a wasteland and a farmer’s market in its best days. How the new hotel came to be started with a glimpse. Manoj Bhoola was driving east over the Flagler Beach bridge over four years ago when, at its apex, he saw the city’s urban core lounge its way to the ocean and thought: wouldn’t that be a good place for a Margaritaville hotel.
That turned into a vision that turned into a $27 million investment, and a downtown remade.
Today, to the delight of city leaders betting big on the hotel’s economic spur and to the relief of residents who endured 15 months of construction, Bhoola, the developer and manager of Ormond Beach-based Elite Hospitality, led the ceremonial ribbon-cutting on the fifth such Compass Hotel his company has built in Florida.
You could tell, Palm Coast-Flagler Regional Chamber President John Phillips said, that Bhoola and his team had the ribbon-cutting down to a science: the moment the ribbon was cut, Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” filled the air like a shower of audible confetti.
“It speaks volumes for our community that the first hotel to be built in Flagler County in 15 years was built in Flagler Beach,” City Manager Dale Martin told an invited crowd of a few dozen in the hotel lobby, between the bar and the reception desk.
Only the mayor had been invited among the city’s commission members, but former Mayor Suzie Johnston was there–appropriately enough, since it was on her watch that the project was born.
“You know what’s really nice is seeing the ribbon being cut on one of the large projects in Flagler Beach,” Johnston, who now chairs the city’s planning board, said. “We have the hotel, the re-paving of A1A, and the pier. It’s nice to finally have a check mark next to something being completed.”
The hotel is having a ripple effect on neighboring businesses, Johnston said, pushing them to renovate, to expand, to raise their game, and to open the way for additional businesses. “It sets a very good benchmark for other businesses currently and coming into Flagler Beach,” the former mayor said. “It’s been nice to be a part of the project, from the groundbreaking to the ribbon cutting.”
The 100-room, four-story hotel employs roughly 80 people, the majority recruited from Flagler Beach and Palm Coast. It took in its first guests today and opened its 120-seat Salty Rim Bar and Grill, along with its twin 120-seat rooftop bar and its views on an Atlantic horizon glittering a few waves further than the 12 miles anyone can see from ground level.
Nine margaritas are on offer, with names like “Who’s to Blame” (with triple sec), “Last Mango in Paris” (Cointreau), “Midnight Blaze” (Ole Smoky Blackberry Moonshine), and so on. There are a couple of dozen beers–the standards plus a few crafts, though Todd Connell, vice president of beverage operations for the company, says choices start small and grow with time. The restaurant fare is mostly island-comfort foods–blackened this, crispy that, and grant your scale a brief suspension of disbelief.
The gift shop downstairs (“Live Life Like a Song”) is a flare of mostly primary-colored and beach-themed t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, lifeguard hats, bucket hats, caps, towels, plus the obligatory tumblers–otherwise known as “big dumb cups”–glasses, mugs. The guest rooms don’t have that grasping vastness of gaudy chains but trend rather to beachside coziness, as if to give the impression that each room were its own cottage. The rooms with ocean views orient the beds that way, so you can see the sunrise from under the covers. There will be sunrises.
“It’s a great day for the city of Flagler Beach and for all of Flagler County to have a wonderful new property here,” Phillips said. “But especially with a nationally recognized brand like Margaritaville, I think that’s a huge step forward for all of us: great recognition of success and good things that are coming here not only to Flagler County but specifically to Flagler Beach.”
Phillips had known Bhoola for years in Volusia County, where Phillips used to be based. Boolah has been keeping an eye on the odd economic climate of the last hundred days or more–the uncertainty, the tariffs (which, he said, would cost a new hotel 25 percent more if it were built today).
“We’re nervous about it, but at the same time, we’re long-term investors,” Boolah said. “Most or all of my family’s assets that we started 26 years ago, we still own and manage. So we have a long-term investment strategy with my family.”
He’s also aware of the recent decline in international tourism into the United States–a nearly 12 percent decline in March, compared to a year earlier, with a 7 percent decline projected for the year. That may not have as much of an effect on a hotel like Compass in Flagler Beach. “Probably 80 or 90 percent of our business is in the state of Florida, or within a 200-mile radius of driving,” Boolah said. “So we don’t really cater to international travel.” He expects only 5 percent of the tourism business locally to be international.
The project survived a few rough periods in its 15 months of construction, early on drawing flak from city commissioners and some residents for allegedly exceeding the permissible construction height, though engineering plans approved by the city’s planners had signed off. “The building department was excellent to work with, and they understood that we only built what was approved originally,” Boolah said. “As long as you have that understanding, you don’t worry about people trying to change their roles later.” The City Commission has since amended its ordinance to clarify height restrictions.
More recently, commissioners were critical of contractors not cleaning up after themselves or overstepping their boundaries, with one commissioner singling out the hotel’s contractors. The excavation of a water main in an unrelated issue on South 2nd Street, closing that street just south of the hotel after it had been closed in front of it for 15 months, hasn’t made things easier.
None of those issues were in evidence today. Nor were the commissioners.
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