Officials in the growing town of Leland expects tourism business to expand along with its population. Recently, tourism and business leaders have been traveling to other areas in the U.S. to encourage more visitors to take advantage of the northern Brunswick County town’s features.

“We just came back from Washington, D.C. promoting golf in the area, and we go next Thursday to Cleveland to promote golf in the area,” said Dana Fisher, executive director of the Northern Brunswick Chamber of Commerce & Visitor Center, on Thursday. “Then we’ll go to Pittsburgh in March. We’re trying to get people coming down that generally go to Myrtle Beach that will stop here and play golf.”  

New hotel rooms will help in the efforts by Fisher, the Leland Tourism Development Authority and others to highlight golf courses, among other attractions, in and around Leland. A new golf course is expected to open at Compass Pointe in May, and the Wells Fargo Championship golf tournament, a stop on the PGA Tour, that will be held at Eagle Point Golf Club in Wilmington in May 2017 is expected to fill up hotels from Myrtle Beach to Jacksonville.

“We will need more hotel rooms,” Fisher said.

And new rooms are in the works. On about 5 acres, a development partnership is building a Fairfield Inn by Marriott and a mini-storage facility in Leland.

The 90-room hotel project is planned for land on Westgate Drive near an existing Best Western Plus.

“We see a lot of great things happening in Leland, and I’m very fortunate to have purchased this property and now we have the franchise for the Fairfield Inn,” said Rajan Shamdasani, one of the development partners who is working on the hotel with his son-in-law, Manoj Bhatia.

The new hotel will be the latest design of the Fairfield Inn by Marriott, Shamdasani said.

“The Marriott chain is at the cutting edge of the hospitality industry and they keep evolving with different product lines they have,” said Shamdasani, who said he has partners who have developed hotels before in Florida and Southern California.

The hotel is planned for about 3 acres of the 5-acre property, with the storage building to be placed on the rest. Shamdasani’s daughter, Shelley Bhatia, is in charge of the storage facility project, and construction is expected to start around the end of March or first of April, he said. Shamdasani, who lives in Fayetteville, also said the upscale storage project, to be called Leland Storage, will be a 75,000-square-foot, three-story building with 500 units that features climate control.

Meanwhile, the hotel plans are in the design stage with no definite timeline for completion, Shamdasani said. He said the builder will be Southeastern Design and Construction of Fayetteville.

New hotels are also on the way to the Port City. In downtown Wilmington this morning, Harmony Hospitality Inc. will hold a groundbreaking for the Convention Center hotel at 11 a.m. The company is building the 186-room Embassy Suites Hotel next to the Wilmington Convention Center on Nutt Street. The privately owned, $36 million hotel will include a restaurant, rooftop bar, pool and additional meeting space and is expected to open in spring 2017.