CU to house students at Hilton Garden Inn

BOULDER — About 100 University of Colorado students will live in a Hilton Garden Inn near campus this fall rather than in dorm rooms.

“The residential hotel experience will provide a very similar living experience as the residence halls and will be staffed with live-in campus housing staff,” CU spokeswoman Melanie Marquez Parra told BizWest in an email. 

Perks for students staying at the Hilton Garden Inn include air conditioning, 49-inch 4K HDTV, cable, dedicated wifi, microwave, mini fridge, workstations, on-site meals, linens, room cleaning and access to a fitness center. 

“Students living in a residential hotel will pay the same cost as if they were living in a standard double room in the residence hall,” Parra said in an email. “Students who live in our residential hotel will remain in the hotel throughout the fall semester.”

BizWest has requested a copy of the contract between CU and the Hilton Garden Inn but it has yet to be provided. 

Parra also confirmed that the “Millennium Harvest House hotel was used in a very limited capacity” to house quarantined students during the spring semester. 

CU’s spring semester contract with the Millennium Harvest House, obtained by BizWest, shows that the hotel agreed to hold 10 single-occupancy king rooms for CU at $125 per night. 

Students were not eligible to receive housekeeping services, and “CU will handle delivery and removal of meals to quarantined students,” the contract stipulated. 

No hotel staff could interact with students, and students were not able to access common areas at the Millennium Harvest House. Private access to the rooms was provided, per the contract.

The contract guaranteed CU access to 70 total nights at a rate of $8,750. Additionally, CU contracted to pay a one-time $2,000 hallway cleaning fee and $825 per room for a biohazard cleaning fee. 

A request for proposals issued early in the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the school is actively seeking hotel partners to provide dorm, classroom and isolation or quarantine space when campus reopens this fall after closing early in the spring semester.

The school wants at least 22 beds in each dorm block and would prefer double-occupancy rooms, the RFP said. Of those, 20 would be for student use, one would house a CU resident adviser and another would be used for isolation or quarantine.

CU has also solicited bids from hotels for classrooms and meeting spaces to allow socially distanced groups of 10 to 20 people to gather.

It is unclear whether the region’s other two major universities, Colorado State University in Fort Collins and the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, plan to follow CU’s lead and seek to secure hotel space for students. 

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