Sustaining Appeal

Secluded Retreat: Jekyll Island Beach

Coastal Georgia’s appeal to travelers is rooted in the beauty of its marshes and tidal creeks, its massive stands of twisted live oaks and its broad beaches where sea turtles nest. A new focus on sustainability is in motion in coastal Georgia tourism, where older buildings get new life as luxury hotels and convention centers are slashing their utility consumption by investing in energy-efficient equipment.

Meanwhile, there’s a heightened awareness that tourism, like most economic development, may have pros but also definitely cons. The sheer volume of tourists and the potential threat overcrowding poses to Savannah’s historic district figure in local discussions, and there’s also concern about capacity on fragile barrier islands, waterways and other natural attractions that make up Georgia’s approximately 100 miles of coastline.

“For us, it’s about livability. We’re at about 16 million visitors a year, and the goal is how to preserve the livability for our residents. We want to be the greatest city to live in first, and then the greatest city to visit,” says Savannah Mayor Van R. Johnson II.

Parkside Resort: Hotel Bardo right, pool, above, photo contributed.

The downtown hotel boom of recent years continues unabated in Savannah, where repurposed buildings get a whole new identity, right down to their names. Joseph Marinelli, president of Visit Savannah, says what was once the Mansion on Forsyth Park is now Hotel Bardo, a high-end urban resort with 149 rooms. The highly anticipated adaptive reuse project also transformed the restaurant on the grounds to Saint Bibiana, coastal-Italian inspired fine dining. The resort also offers a club membership for area residents that provides access to the fitness facilities, pool and private club above Saint Bibiana.

The Bardo capitalizes on its location next to Forsyth Park, a 30-acre green space that forms part of the boundary of the city’s historic district.

At the other end of the historic district, a newly constructed 150-room AC by Marriott is expected to open this spring on River Street, and a LEED-certified Tempo by Hilton is taking shape on the Bryan Street lot which used to house a GBI office building. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.)

The biggest buzz surrounds a pair of unrelated renovations on opposite sides of historic Johnson Square. One will convert a circa 1915, 15-story office building and a shorter building adjacent to it into a Ritz-Carlton hotel and residences; the second will return a 10-story building converted to office use in the mid-1980s to its original 1912 role as a hotel.

Marinelli says the Ritz-Carlton project currently is in the stage of buying out leases in the buildings at 2 E. Bryan St. and 14 E. Bryan St.

Plans call for a 100-room hotel and 20 residences, along with restaurants and a private club. The building is probably best known as the “Savannah Skyscraper” because at 15 stories, it’s the tallest building in the defined historic district.

“I don’t think any Savannahian ever dreamed there would be a Ritz-Carlton here,” Marinelli says.

Plans for the other structure, known as the Manger Building and located across the square at 7 E. Congress St., call for a wellness club as well as a hotel.

Remodeled and Expanding: Rendering of the Savannah Convention Center on Hutchinson Island, photo contributed.

“From a tourism perspective or what we call the visitor economy, Savannah has continued to perform very, very well in the post-pandemic era. What I mean by that is that 2022 and 2023 will both be record-breaking years for us in hotel occupancies and hotel rates. It tells us our marketing is working, and No. 2, people are traveling again, and No. 3, that our destination continues to offer what people want,” Marinelli says. (Data from Visit Savannah’s commissioned study of tourism in 2023 will not be available until May.)

Marinelli also points to the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport as a strength for the tourism sector. This includes a very fluid list of cities – currently 41 – for which nonstop flights are available in and out of Savannah. But he has bigger plans in mind.

“We’re looking at exploring potential charter service to London and Dublin, starting in 2024,” he says. “This is conceptual. We would work together with our partners in Hilton Head. Maybe one of the ideas is a golf/shopping charter, to golf on Hilton Head and shop in Savannah. The first step is building packages like that and negotiating with an airline to charter the flight.”

LEED Convention Centers

“Bigger” often isn’t a good word when it comes to sustainability. The Georgia coast’s two convention centers are trying turn that around.

These centers have remodeled, expanded and replaced buildings with construction techniques and ongoing operational methods chosen to reduce their environmental footprint.

“A lot of people do consider convention centers as energy hogs, just because of the sheer size,” says Ronnie Hickman, director of operations for the Savannah Convention Center. Instead, he says, Savannah’s center pursued and earned LEED Gold certification in 2017 and will maintain that status when it almost doubles in size with the opening of an expansion later this year.

“It’s one of those things that a lot of our clients care about, and we want to do what is best for our clients, and for our area,” he says.

Protecting Wildlife: The Georgia Sea Turtle Center offers guided sunrise walks to teach visitors about turtle nesting on Jekyll Island, photo contributed.

The convention center was built on Hutchinson Island in the Savannah River, facing Savannah’s River Street, in 1999 and opened in 2000. The 2017 refurbishment modernized the kitchen equipment and the HVAC, among other things, making the LEED Gold certification possible and leading to whopping reductions in operating costs through lower utility bills.

“Before we changed our cooling tower and the dishwashing, our water bill was $7,000 a month, and now it’s $350 to $400,” Hickman says, adding that the center saw similar savings on other utilities.

Environmental Design: The Jekyll Island Convention Center was constructed as a LEED-certified building, photo contributed.

Sustainable measures began at the design stage with the inclusion of lots of exterior windows for “daylight harvesting.” Other methods employed have been the use of low- or no-VOC (volatile organic compounds) paints, choosing roofing with high values for thermal resistance and using LED lighting both indoors and in the parking lot, according to Hickman.

The $271 million expansion of the Savannah Convention Center will not only double the exhibit space to 200,000 square feet and add a 900-space parking garage, it’ll also add 15 additional meeting rooms and a 40,000-square-foot ballroom.

Before the expansion began, a typical year at the center meant 160 events drawing about a total of 200,000 people. Savannah wanted to compete for larger conventions, and the new facility has already begun to produce the desired results, according to Marinelli, who is a board member for the convention center’s governing authority by virtue of his position at Visit Savannah.

Sustainability is also a priority to Savannah’s south, just a 90-minute drive along the coast, where the 128,000- square-foot Jekyll Island Convention Center stands.

Updated Luxury: The Cloister at Sea Island, photo contributed.

“The Jekyll Island Convention Center was constructed as a LEED-certified building and works on water conservation and energy use reduction in its day-to-day operations,” says Mark Williams, executive director of the Jekyll Island Authority. “The building also has stormwater retention capabilities with a cistern that stores stormwater to be used for landscaping irrigation.”

That certification means you’ll find things like electric car charging stations and solar water-heating systems in place as well.

And Williams reports the convention center performs well financially, with fiscal 2024 being the most successful year on record since the original facility was built in 1961.

Nature-loving Jekyll Island

Unspoiled open spaces, be it rolling dunes, driftwood-littered beaches or thick maritime forests, are Jekyll Island’s big draw. The drumbeat of sustainability echoes here, too. In fact, state-owned Jekyll Island is essentially one giant sustainability project, if you consider the development limits Georgia has long imposed in an effort to protect the natural setting that attracts visitors in the first place. Now, construction is underway on the last developable land covered by current restrictions – not for hotels, but for private residences. That doesn’t mean the development won’t have a tourism angle, however.

Boutique Hotels: Oaks on the River in McIntosh County, photo contributed.

The site formerly housed the Buccaneer Motor Lodge. A formal market assessment showed that homes were the best use of the land, Williams says, and as a result, the leaseholder is now developing 25 single-family homes to be named Seaside Retreat.

Williams says he expects many of them will be owner-occupied but that short-term rentals would be allowed under terms of local regulation, as they are in other Jekyll residential areas. “An annual license is required for all short-term rentals on the island, which sets standards for property safety, services and amenities that must be present on the property,” he says.

Sustainability is also a factor in this construction, Williams says. “These 25 homes are being designed to utilize the sun and shading to decrease heat load in the homes and, combined with geothermal technology for heating and cooling, should be the most energy-efficient homes constructed on Jekyll Island.”

It’s not just the built environment that gets attention on Jekyll Island, but the natural one as well. The Jekyll Island Authority’s regulations require that all hotels limit light visible from the beach during the turtles’ nesting season. “This greatly contributes to the success of Jekyll Island as one of the highest ratios of developed nesting beaches on the Georgia coast,” he says.

Managing the human volume of tourism is an issue in sustainability as well. Currently, the island welcomes around 3.5 million visitors a year.

Hotel Simone on St. Simons Island, photo contributed.

“While visitation is still high on Jekyll Island, we can see a trend of ‘stabilization’ in visitation numbers, which works well with our efforts to spread visitation across the island to retain a more natural and uncrowded setting,” Williams says.

The amenities inventory on Jekyll is getting some updates as well, starting with the consolidation of some of the golf course stock on the island. The Pine Lakes course closed in January to install new turf and irrigation systems. Once that is complete, the next step will be to combine the Oleander and Great Dunes courses into a single 18-hole course, turning 50 acres of what is now golf course into a wildlife conservation area. The combined course will be restored to the original 1927 Walter Travis design.

Jekyll Island has also realized a goal it has been pursuing for more than a decade: having medical services available on the island. As of September 2023, Mercer Medicine operates an urgent and primary care practice on the island.

While the sandy beaches of Jekyll, St. Simons and Sea Island are a major tourist draw, Glynn County is also home to another travel asset – Interstate 95, on the home stretch into Florida. The county hosts four interchanges, which in turn are home to multiple motels. For the most part, these travelers aren’t consumers of any of Glynn County’s attractions – but their overnight presence means more local option hotel/motel tax money for local government. Several new hotels are under construction at Exit 38, says Scott McQuade, president and CEO of the Golden Isles Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Those “bed taxes” are helping to pay for the upcoming refurbishment of Coast Guard Beach on St. Simons Island, he says, including things like new restrooms, a centrally located lifeguard and police station and aesthetic improvements.

Coastal Railway: An excursion train now operates out of Kingsland Station, photo contributed.

The county’s hotel inventory ranges from the utilitarian chains along the interstate to the updated luxury of the Cloister at Sea Island resort. And hotels are truly a part of the community. Look, for example, at Hotel Simone on St. Simons Island. This boutique all-suites hotel – which got in on the rooftop bar craze early when it opened in 2019 – has partnered with the nearby Glynn Visual Arts to host an artist in residence program, in which their works are featured on the walls of the hotel lobby, and guests have the opportunity to meet the artist at a reception.

Meanwhile, the new Buc-ee’s at Exit 42 off I-95 in Glynn County broke ground in January, which will entice tourists to pause along the interstate.

“It will be the first development on Exit 42 and will likely spur a tremendous amount of development,” says McQuade, pointing to plans for an RV campground that have already been approved.

“As for Brunswick, the big story is the continuation of the downtown renaissance. Brunswick is really gaining a lot of momentum,” he says. The historic downtown, also known as Old Town Brunswick, boasts buildings from the late 1800s like the Old City Hall with its distinctive clock tower, and the Ritz Theatre, which had its original sign restored during its ongoing renovation.

Attractions Along the Coast

Development has taken an upscale turn on the banks of the river in Darien, where Oaks on the River Luxury Boutique Resort is in its second year of operation. Just months after opening, the resort hosted a conference focusing on sustainability, with experts discussing topics like solar energy, recycling and coastal management, which is so critical to the region.

“Without question, Oaks on the River gives McIntosh County a site like we have never had before,” says Thomas Draffin, president and CEO of the McIntosh County Industrial Development Authority. “We have taken a number of prospects there.”

The resort aims to capitalize on the hunting and fishing culture of the surrounding rural area and offers 53 rooms and suites. It’s part of real estate entrepreneur Art Lucas’ three-pronged development on the riverbank – which also includes high-end condos and a restaurant.

Scenic Dock: The Spanish tall ship replica Nao Trinidad was one of the first boats to use the St. Marys Intracoastal Gateway Marina, photo contributed.

“It doesn’t take anything away from our seafood restaurants, which are irreplaceable, but it gives us a conference facility that will hold 100-plus people for dinner,” Draffin says.

Camden County, the southernmost county on the coast, is the launching place for tourists bound for Cumberland Island National Seashore and, with more hotel rooms and restaurants than nearby smaller towns, also serves as a temporary home base for those bound for the Okefenokee Swamp just slightly inland.

In St. Marys, much of the waterfront focus falls on the National Parks Service ferry to Cumberland Island. But there’s a new asset, this one operated by the picturesque town itself – the St. Marys Intracoastal Gateway Marina.

“The first of three phases opened in October and among the first boats to use it was the Spanish tall ship replica Nao Trinidad,” says Angela Wigger, tourism director for St. Marys. The 93-foot-long, four-masted ship spent much of the winter there.

The marina is designed for transient ships, not permanent moorings, and offers electrical and pump-out service as well as a crew house, Wigger says, adding the cement docks can accommodate 11 small boats.

Meanwhile, St. Marys is developing its own tourism attractions, rather than just serving as the embarkation point for Cumberland. Wigger says Molly’s Old South Tours is now operating there, offering a variety of tours of the town and surrounding area.

In Kingsland, an excursion train now operates out of Kingsland Station, offering short, themed outings, periodic train shows and other activities aimed at the train culture of Southeast Georgia.

“The ferry to Cumberland is only about eight miles from here, and the nearest entrance to the Okefenokee is 15 miles,” says Tonya Harvey, executive director of the Kingsland Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The Okefenokee Swamp has been at the center of a bitter dispute over an out-of-state mining company’s plan to mine titanium near the swamp’s border – a move which many fear could endanger the fragile ecosystem of the swamp.

“One of the big things the Okefenokee has going for it is its nomination as a World Heritage Site, and we’re hoping that will be a catalyst for more people to visit,” Harvey says.

The “more people” that she references brings us full circle on the sustainability question. When does the human load of tourism get too great to bear for the beaches, swamps, marshes and historic sites that draw these millions of visitors – and their money – to coastal Georgia? There seems to be no answer for that – yet – but meanwhile, the search is on for ways to lessen the impact of the traveler upon the destination.