Growing coastal lodging company tearing down Depoe Bay property to replace it with 89-room, $20 million hotel

By ANGELA NEBEL/Lincoln Chronicle

DEPOE BAY — A ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday marked the end of a Depoe Bay landmark and the launch of a new enterprise. Atop a bluff overlooking Fogarty Beach, demolition of the Clarion Inn Surfrider Resort has already begun, making way for a new 89-room hotel — Cambria Depoe Bay.

Purchased by Depoe Bay Hospitality in 2017, the facility was comprised of multiple buildings, some dating back more than 50 years. After the change in ownership, Surfrider operated under the umbrella of Fusion Lodging, a Portland-based hospitality group that owns or manages 13 hotels and motels on the Oregon coast.

In April, Fusion officials notified Choice Hotels, the brand manager for Clarion, of their intent to close after honoring some final reservations. Fusion operations manager Sharleen Hagadorn said the age of the buildings and decades of harsh weather conditions had taken an irreversible toll.

“The buildings are just old and as buildings get older, you get rusty pipes and electrical issues. From a purely business standpoint, you have to take in the building needs,” Hagadorn told the Lincoln Chronicle.

Fusion’s early years managing the property included attempted improvements, but the need for repairs continued to climb and impacted something that Hagadorn said was a deciding factor — guest reviews.

“Can we fix what the guests want us to fix? We watched the reviews and we had to think about what made sense here. (The timing) was mostly based on seeing a decline in our reviews and knowing we couldn’t make our guests happy,” she explained.

Fusion plans instead to provide customers with a larger, more modern hotel that includes a new restaurant, bar, fitness center, and indoor pool. With an anticipated investment of $20 million, the new hotel is projected to open in the summer of 2027.

The property will continue to operate under the Choice Hotels umbrella, but as a Cambria property, which the manager described as more upscale than the previous Clarion.

For Fusion Lodging, which most recently bought the Alsi Resort in Waldport and owns properties in Yachats and Newport, the Surfrider project will be its biggest and first new construction. Although it comes at a substantial cost, the process of building from the ground up allowed the company to integrate new features that the previous footprint did not allow.

“We have some exciting plans for putting in an outdoor dining area and a portion of that will be pet friendly,” Hagadorn said. Months of thought and planning went into the design, but not everything is definitively nailed down.

“We are going to have a little bit of extra space that I’m excited to say they have given me some creative license with,” she shared. Spa service was one of the ideas floated for that area. “We have talked about the potential of a lot of things. We have some surprises that will come when we are 100 percent sure of how we will use that space.”

Growing from the current 54 rooms to 89, as well as offering a new dining experience, is also expected to increase the number of employees. During peak summer months, Surfrider employed roughly 60 employees. Hagadorn said staffing considerations will be made over the coming year but expects that the number of employees may end up around 80.

At the official project kick-off on Thursday, Fusion Lodging chief executive officer Sazzadur Rahman and his staff were joined by Construction Management NW owner George Quillen and his crew, as well as Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis. Visitors saw motel buildings already under demolition, thanks to a practice exercise in early May that provided local firefighters with training opportunities.

• Angela Nebel is a Newport freelancer writer and Lincoln Chronicle contributor who can be reached at [email protected]