Edgewater Hotel's Holly Reynolds on Meeting & Event Management and Unique Waterfront Experience

I'm Holly Reynolds. I'm a catering sales manager here at the Edgewater. We have a whole staff of catering sales managers. We have about nine people who split the markets of people who want to have events here. I handle people who are not staying at the hotel. They're actually just coming in for mostly day long meetings and I handle groups up to 60 people. So anywhere from a five person all day business meeting to a 60 person evening reception for a corporate event but yeah all corporate, all organizations.

I would say that the most unique thing about the Edgewater is certainly the water view and specifically our location on the water. We're physically right on top of it. If we were to drill straight down we'd be in the water. Over half the hotel is actually not on land. It's on pilings over the water which just gives it a really unique feel. Our restaurant you can look down you're directly over the water. It's an excellent atmosphere for people who want to have some Pacific Northwest vibes to be able to look out and see West Seattle to look out and see the Olympic mountains all day long every day. It's something that people request often to have a water view in any of our meeting space or guest rooms and it's probably the thing that is the biggest draw for people who come to the Edgewater.

The Beatles stayed here in 1969 which is probably one of our biggest claims to fame. We do have a suite directly beneath us actually on the second floor that is the Beatles suite where they stayed where they fished out of the hotel window and there's kind of an iconic music rock and roll vibe that the Edgewater gives off as well. We are actually in a similar setting price range all of that to a lot of the five star hotels downtown Seattle. It's tough to compare. We are the only waterfront hotel in the history of Seattle. No one else can offer the views that we offer.

We also are we're a boutique hotel and we're not owned by a large company that has hundreds of properties worldwide. We're only a nationwide company. There's several properties in Florida as well as California and another one here called the Deca Hotel in Seattle. That kind of gives it a smaller feel. We're more customizable. We're more unique where every single one of the Edgewater, excuse me, the Noble House is the company that owns us. Every single property is special. They do not look the same but a lot of the time when people are browsing for venues they look at places like the four seasons they look at places like the Fairmont and they can offer a lot of other things. They can that we can't offer since they are such large companies and they can host probably bigger events than we can.

Our max is 220 for a suite of event in our Olympic ballroom but we have a Pacific Northwest vibe that people want and so we're we're compared with the other five star hotels in the area although we do have that sort of unique feel as well. We have everything it's tough for me to pick out one that is the most common. I would say that probably weddings are the ones that people think of first. Upstairs, two floors or excuse me one floor right above us is our Olympic ballroom and it has Florida ceiling entire West wall window view of the Olympic mountains which is stunning. We do an average of a hundred to 150 weddings per year. Some of them there, some of them in other spaces in the hotel as well but I would say our most common is going to be the day long meetings.

Mostly my groups and then similar to that is going to be groups that come in and have meetings here and stay in the hotel. We do that constantly. We've got groups here today so lots and lots of corporate events here. That's it's a combination of both social and corporate but I feel the corporate is probably the most common. At the actual hotel for event purposes only which is a lot of what I do with we do all the tables, linens, chairs, set up, tear down a beverage event. We offer service as far as beverage service, food service. All of the food is catered in-house through our six seven restaurant. It's prepared by the same exact chefs. It's often using the same menus that our restaurant uses and we do not allow like outside food. We handle everything.

All the food, all the beverage. We offer also on-site AV. It's through another company called PSAV. They don't work for the Edgewater. They're all over the city but they are on-site here so we do offer every single room is AV capable. Those are kind of our main basic kind of boring meetings face of things that we can equipment that we kind of require but we also do we can do rentals for specialty linens. We do specialty food items. Any kind of thing that you would need for an event we can pretty much do it. Pretty much everything. We're a full service, 100% full service event venue. Also our level of service is impeccable. We really pride ourselves on the level of professionalism that our event staff works with and it's constant.

Everyone we know that you come in contact with your event. We know that they're giving you the best level of service. It's the best place I've ever worked. I mean I'm not just saying that. I very much enjoy working here. I love being a part of my events team and I feel that we treat our customers really well and we always want them to come back and they look out the window and they want to come back too so it's pretty nice. We also have actually an outdoor space on our fourth floor that's really unique to the hotel. It's completely outdoors. It's connected to one of our rooms called the terrace room and it offers stunning views of downtown Seattle and the space needle which I feel you can't get that view from anywhere else either and it's complete total private outdoor space of over 900 square feet which is pretty impressive down on the water so that's another thing I feel it's unique.