For oil and gas workers, Pa. hotels learning the drill

To endear a hotel to the oil and gas crowd, give them a place to eat and sleep at all hours of the day, a place to wash their boots, a warm place to smoke in the winter, and a cold beer once in a while.

So goes the formula developed by Tejas Gosai, president of the Washington, Pa.-based Shale Hotel Inc. The company is managing two hotels geared toward oil and gas workers, building two others, and preparing to turn the Monroeville Holiday Inn into an industry destination for workers summoned by the Marcellus Shale boom.

Gosai represents a group of four doctors, among them his father, who bought the 187-room Monroeville hotel in June. His goal is to replicate his earlier experience and attract at least half the hotel's guests from the oil and gas fields.

The Gosais have been in the hotel business for a dozen years. Kam Gosai co-owns the Holiday Inn Express and the Best Western Garden Inn in Bentleyville.

These hotels weren't built for oil and gas workers but have slowly shifted in that direction. Consider the food, which seems never to stop.

Breakfast is served from 3 to 10:30 a.m. Guests rushing out the door to a job are given bags so they can toss in breakfast burritos and be on their way.

At 1 p.m., soup and popcorn start in the lobby. Two hours later, another breakfast shift begins. In the evenings, there are happy hours and wine, beer, and cheese receptions.

Outside, Tejas Gosai has plopped a few heating lamps, winterized chairs to accommodate the smokers, and boot-washing stations where workers can hose off their gear.

At most hotels, the housekeeping staff works a morning shift. At Gosai's, they work all hours, with shifts staggered to accommodate gas workers' unorthodox schedules.

Because of the hotels' itinerant clientele, Gosai has required everyone on the housekeeping staff to take a course in bedbug inspection. And for good measure, he pays for monthly visits from a New York-based dog trained to smell bedbugs and ticks.

As the two older hotels adapt, the ones in progress - an 86-room Studio 6 Extended Stay motel and a 79-room Microtel Suites & Inn by Wyndham - are being created to target the industry.

At the Studio 6, Gosai has sacrificed a guest room to build a mudroom - a place where workers will be able to use their room key cards to open lockers, toss their work clothes in, and step into the hotel with clean shoes.

According to Smith Travel Research Inc., a Nashville-based hotel-consulting group, Washington County hotel occupancy rates increased from the mid-50 percent level to the low 70 percent range between 2007 and 2013.

Major chains took notice. In 2011, Marriott created a website for the oil and gas industry, Marcellusshalepahotels.com.; Shaner Hotel Group has Marcellusshalehotels.com.

"In that specific market, you're in the fortunate position that your guests don't have a lot of choice," said Jan Freitag, senior vice president with Smith Travel Research. "For now, people are pretty happy to just have a room."

Hotels differentiate themselves when they pay attention to the idiosyncratic needs of the industry, Freitag said.

Gosai plans to dream up oil and gas drinks for the Monroeville Holiday Inn's bar. He's thinking "shale shots."

"We're still figuring out what we have to do in Monroeville," he said, but the plan is to re-create the Washington County model there and anywhere else his hotel interests intersect with oil and gas.

"I don't think of hotels as a business," Gosai said. "I think of them as a science. If you put up a bird feeder, as long as you just put some food in there, birds are going to go in there."