STONE HARBOR – Eustice Mita, the ICONA Resorts chief who is fighting to build a major resort hotel in Ocean City, had a message for local leaders recently: The county needs more hotels.
Mita said that the number of hotel rooms available to the public has plummeted in Cape May and Ocean City by 50% and 70% respectively in the past 30 years and that tourism and county revenue will suffer if something is not done to bolster hotel room inventory.
“In Ocean City, we haven’t seen a new hotel in 50 years. It’s the same in Cape May,” he told a crowd of business leaders, politicians and other leading members of the Cape May County community at a chamber of commerce luncheon Jan. 16.
Mita currently has two major hotel proposals in the works: One where Wonderland Pier in Ocean City stood before it closed in October 2024, the other a renovation and expansion of an existing motel in Wildwood Crest. The status of plans for a hotel he proposed in 2021 for Cape May’s promenade could not be immediately determined.
The fact that visitors have fewer places to stay has hurt the local economy, Mita said. The average hotel room at an ICONA Resort, he said, is occupied by four people who spend three days in the county.
Mita said that when a hotel closes another does not take its place. Instead, the usual culprit – a duplex, a triplex, a condominium complex – springs up.
“The ground is too valuable to justify a hotel,” he said, flipping through a PowerPoint of now-defunct hotels, none of which were replaced by accommodations that can house short-term visitors who budget hundreds if not thousands of dollars per trip.
He read excerpts from a book, “Historic Cape May, New Jersey,” to the audience. The book quoted a business leader in 1870 who said that Cape May County is 50 years behind its peers in terms of tourism accommodations and infrastructure. He said that the idea rings true today.
“If there’s ever a time we need to be awake in wonderful Cape May County, it’s today,” he said. “We’re losing so slowly we think we’re winning.”
A major problem, he said, is that the land where locally owned hotels once stood is too valuable for hotels to be built; the profit incentive is not there. He said that neither of his proposed hotels would be profitable in their first eight years; they are only possible because of the massive capital ICONA has generated in its years of operation in Avalon, Diamond Beach and Cape May.
Mita also has faced strong opposition from residents and officials to some of his proposals. His Wildwood Crest project was approved by the Crest Planning Board last year only after a lengthy period of time and long hearings at which residents voiced their complaints. In Cape May, Mita hoped to be granted a redevelopment zone for his resort there, to make construction easier and to bypass zoning restrictions, but did not receive support from the City Council. Hearings in Ocean City late last year about his plans for Wonderland drew large crowds with questions and worries about the site’s future.
ICONA’s chief executive officer has an intense love for Cape May County. He spoke at length at the chamber luncheon about his family’s 90-year history in the county and said that the Cape is his favorite place in the entire world.
“When we design a project we want to say years and years from now that it stood the test of time,” he said, stressing that he has turned down several advances from private equity firms that he felt would cheapen or compromise the quality of his resorts.
“The only risk in these projects is ICONA spending $150 million on a seasonal hotel,” he said, stressing that seasonal resorts are the most difficult to operate of any kind of short-term rental.
Two local political leaders spoke at the meeting in support of Mita. Krista McConnell, a Wildwood commissioner, said to him: “You are welcome in Wildwood.” Mita mused that he has considered a hotel in the vicinity of the Wildwoods Convention Center, which sits on the oceanfront.
Jennifer Gensemer, Stone Harbor council president, expressed dismay at the difficulty faced by any hotel development in Cape May County. She used The Reeds at Shelter Haven in Stone Harbor, the resort where the day’s luncheon was held, as an example of staunch opposition against local development.
“At first, they turned down an exact replica of what was here historically,” she said.
Contact the reporter, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 156.
