For Monarch Beach Resort, Altruism Is Grand

It’s been a hellish 18 months for The St. Regis Monarch Beach.

Still known in some circles—quite unfairly—as “the AIG resort,” the 5-star California resort is turning the page by offering one of the most generous charitable promotions in the hotel industry, giving away meeting space for nonprofit organizations at no charge throughout 2010.

There is no catch—minimum spend is negotiable, and any government-recognized charitable organization may apply. Food and beverage service is not free, but it does come with a 10% discount. The only restriction is on space availability.

The offer is part altruism, part marketing. Group business continues to be off (although it is on the rebound), and the resort sees this as a way to fill those empty meeting spaces while also doing some good in the community. Within 24 hours of announcing the program last week, the resort picked up three group business leads, including one charity interested in moving its event from a competing hotel.

“We’re in the charity business, in terms of who comes to us looking for galas, events, those types of social functions, and we just listened to them,” says Michael Mustafa, the resort’s director of sales and marketing. “The charities have talked about being down in terms of their fund-raising, and they’re looking for donations. We just realized that, as much as the hotel industry and the luxury sector in particular have struggled, [charities] are struggling, too. Why not make it a win-win for both?”

A cynic might suggest the offer is amends for the resort’s role in the infamous 2008 AIG scandal, when the insurance company spent lavishly at Monarch Beach only weeks after accepting bailout funds from the U.S. government. But for the resort, that was a merely case of guilt-by-association, and there was never anything to apologize for.

Simply put, this has nothing to do with that, Mustafa says.

“We have moved on from what transpired in 2008, and we’re trying to reestablish ourselves in the convention meeting sector,” he says. “We just chose to continue moving forward with our positive PR initiatives and conduct our business.

“We realized that although ‘09 was a pretty tough year, ‘10 is going to still be a struggle, and we realized that we still needed to make sure we were doing the right thing. We saw charities as being a market we could reach out to. We see a lot of what’s going on in the world, and we realized this was a good outreach to something we wanted to get involved with.”