Key Largo is getting fancier.
When it opens this summer, the Playa Largo Resort & Spa will bring a new element of luxury to the northernmost island of the Florida Keys.
The hotel at 97450 Overseas Highway will be the first full-service resort built in Key Largo in more than 20 years. Observers say it signals Key Largo’s evolution from a sleepy fishing retreat to a more upscale destination, particularly for people from Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.
“It’s a real jewel,” said Larry Abbo, CEO of Prime Hospitality Group of Hollywood, which is developing the new resort with longtime hospitality partner Shaner Hotels of Pennsylvania. “Playa Largo Resort & Spa is one of the most exciting projects we’ve developed from the ground up.”
The resort will include 144 rooms, 10 bungalows and a Beach House — a two-story, three-bedroom Florida mansion with full kitchen and a private beach.
In each room, an iPad connected to a smart TV will enable guests to monitor in-room features and entertainment as well as make restaurant and tour reservations, a hotel spokesman said. Hotel guests will check in using iPads in the lobby.
Playa Largo will have several restaurants, including a seafood restaurant, a ceviche bar and a steakhouse. It will include a 6,000-square-foot ballroom, an 8,000-square-foot manicured lawn for weddings, a full-service spa and a marina.
“People have always enjoyed visiting Key Largo, but our goal with this property is to provide a luxurious yet laidback resort,” Abbo said.
Room rates are expected to start in the mid-$200s and run to more than $500 depending on season, said Mark Calibo, the resort’s director of sales and marketing.
He expects couples and families to make up 60 percent to 65 percent of the resort’s business. Destination weddings also are a target market.
The Keys always has been popular with South Floridians. During July, August and September, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area is the No.1 source of visitors, according to data from nSight for travel, a provider of consumer shopping intelligence for the travel industry. The rest of the year, South Florida ranks No. 2 behind New York.
The Keys attracts nearly 3 million overnight visitors annually, according to tourism records.
Playa Largo “is a huge addition to the destination of Key Largo,” said Stacey Mitchell, director of sales for the Monroe County Tourist Development Council. “There’s always a buzz with a new opening, and this one will have the whole Marriott machine behind it.”
Playa Largo is likely to appeal to affluent travelers and fishing enthusiasts as well as meeting and incentive groups looking for an upscale island-type destination as an alternative to going offshore, Mitchell said.
Max Comess of real estate firm Holliday Fenoglio Fowler in Miami, said Key Largo is continuing a move toward luxury in the Keys. “The same transformation and flight to quality that occurred in Key West and Islamorada in recent years appears to be happening in Key Largo,” Comess said.
The last full-service resort built in Key Largo was the Marriott Resort Key Largo Bay in 1993, Monroe County records show. The Hilton Key Largo Resort further south was built in 1985.
Prime and Shaner, who co-own Playa Largo, bought the site of a stalled condo project that had previously housed an RV Park with about 155 hookups and another nearby property in order to acquire enough “keys,” or room rights, to build the new waterfront resort.
Shaner President Plato Ghinos said he fell in love with the old RV site and its potential the first time Abbo showed it to him, even though he said it looked like a “jungle” back then.
“The Florida Keys has always been a good market, with some nice properties, but also lots of honky-tonks,” Ghinos said. “We saw a perfect opportunity for us to offer a unique high-end experience to [fill] in what’s missing.”
Construction of Playa Largo began in March 2014, and the resort was originally slated to open in summer 2015. Conservation efforts on the site as well as bad weather delayed it.
“There’s a lot of indigenous plant life and fauna that surrounds us, and we had to move certain things and certain things had to be brought back,” Calibo, the marketing director, said.
For example, several gumbo limbo trees by the resort’s waterside were moved to make way for a green lawn picnic area and then replanted elsewhere on the property. Other native plants were added as habitats for the area’s butterfly species.
In all, more than 1,000 ecological surveys were conducted on the site to minimize the impact of the resort’s construction, Calibo said.
Playa Largo will be one of 10 Florida hotels including three in Miami-Dade County, that are part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection, which touts its portfolio of independent hotels as being “Exactly like nothing else.”
“We take on the flavor that’s indigenous to the area,” Calibo said.
Playa Largo’s rooms, for example, have nautical and fishing village design while the lobby features terrazzo flooring with inlaid petrified wood slices, shell chandeliers and artwork with oyster shells.
More new lodgings have opened across the Keys recently after some loosening of strict growth restrictions.
Key Largo could get another upscale resort within the next few years with plans to convert the Point of View RV Resort at 99060 Overseas Highway into a 138-room luxury boutique.
Other new properties include a Hilton Garden Inn, Fairfield Inn & Suites and Gates Hotel in Key West and The Marker Waterfront Resort, which opened in December 2014, the first hotel in 20 years to be built in Key West’s Old Town historic district.
Investors lured by the Keys’ strong tourism market also are snapping up long-time staples in Key Largo such as the 200-room Hilton Key Largo Resort, which sold in February for $62.3 million to a San Francisco private equity firm, Monroe County property records show.
Prime and Shaner have partnered on other projects in South Florida, including a 95-room Courtyard by Marriott Marathon that opened in February and the 95-room Fairfield Inn & Suites in Delray, which opened in February 2015.
Playa Largo marks their ninth hotel collaboration.
The companies also have other projects in the pipeline, including a 137-room Courtyard by Marriott hotel that will be part of a mixed-use development in downtown Fort Lauderdale called Quantum at Flagler Village. That development, bordering Federal Highway, also will include two residential towers and 21,000 square feet of retail space.
Prime and Shaner also are planning a Hilton hotel for Aventura.
, Twitter@TheSatchreport
