Wine & Food cancellation hits local hotels

Cancellation of the McMinnville Wine & Food Classic this weekend immediately sent shockwaves through the local hospitality industry.

Red Lion Inn & Suites on Northeast Cumulus Avenue, just down the road from the event site, was particularly hard hit, front desk assistant Jay Ptacek said.

Fourteen people have canceled their weekend reservations so far, he said Thursday. If seven more cancel, he said, the hotel will lose a third of its bookings for the weekend.

“One woman told me she canceled because she thought her flight to Oregon was going to be canceled,” he said.

The front desk clerk at Comfort Inn & Suites on Southeast Stratus Avenue, who declined to identify herself, said there has been a “small impact” from weekend cancellations.

Like the Red Lion, the Comfort Inn is 1.5 miles from the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum where the annual event known as Sip! was to be held.

Alex McMurray, manager of the Hotel Oregon about 3 miles away in downtown McMinnville at Third and Evans streets, said he also had seen a drop-off in weekend reservations related to the cancellation of the Wine & Food Classic. “A lot of people were coming from out of the area,” he said.

Visitors to the area accounted for a lot of the cancellations at Red Lion. Most came through email without specifying particular reasons, Ptacek said.

 Michelle Grannis, concierge at the Atticus Hotel downtown on Northeast Ford Street, said cancellation of the event barely fazed her business.

“We actually don’t get too many people staying here for the Sip!,” Grannis said.

Ptacek said the Red Lion gets quite a few Sip! visitors every year. It may draw more people than the Atticus because the downtown hotel opened only two years ago, he said.

“We’ve been working with the people at Sip! long before the Atticus was built,” he said.