Celebrating 50 Years with Coast Hotels: An Origin Story

Coast Hotels celebrates 50 years this upcoming fall, with its first hotel being founded in September of 1972. To honour this milestone birthday, we want to share a bit about our very humble beginnings. And who better to tell this story than one of Coast's founders, Rob O'Neill!

The Origins of Coast Hotels

To anyone looking for a story of brilliant planning and astute business strategy — go no further. 

This is a story of perseverance and opportunism, fueled by the urgency of empty pockets and a desire to build something tangible with the tools in hand. 

This is also a story about a young BC businessman, J.J. "Jack" O'Neill, father of seven boys and schooled in "hard knocks" in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is Jack's story of working in Canadian railroad hotels and industrial camp catering, starting with nothing and getting little education, yet persevering.

This story is also about Jack's eldest son Rob, who grew up working in his father's company, National Caterers Ltd. Rob laboured in the work camps and rail catering, utilising those experiences to enter and graduate from hotel school in 1971. 

National Caterers Ltd.

Jack built National Caterers from its founding in 1960 into a large, well-established railway and camp catering company. In the '60s, BC was exploding with new resource projects in timber, mining, oil, and rail — and Jack's companies directly benefited from that growth. 

National Caterers was awarded a project to house construction workers from the new Tahsis Co. pulp mill, being built on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The mill would be down a gravel road in a remote area about nine miles from anything, 50 miles due west of Campbell River. A new town called Gold River was also being built nearby to support the mill. 

The National Caterers camp was called Heber Lodge and it housed the single men working at the new pulp mill. It was a 140-man camp, located about a quarter-mile from the town towards the mill. It morphed from a construction camp after the mill's opening to housing for the single men who couldn't or didn't want to move permanently to the new model town of Gold River, which was completed in the late 1960s. 

Fun fact: Rob, Jack's oldest son, worked at Heber Lodge himself as a night grill cook and camp manager in the extended summer of 1968.

Nearby in town, Delta Hotels built a new 50-room hotel, the Gold River Chalet, in 1967. It was closed almost immediately, due to a personal dispute between Jack Christensen, CEO of Tahsis Co. (owned jointly by East Asiatic from Denmark and International Paper from Alabama) and Bill Pattison, CEO of Delta Hotels.

Delta wanted the construction worker contract that National Caterers had at Heber Lodge to support its new hotel. Without the contract, the hotel operated at just 10-20% occupancy. This was largely because the town hadn't grown to 5,000 people as predicted, but only around 2,500. Christensen denied Delta the contract and Pattison closed the nearly new hotel permanently. 

Without a lively hotel at its centre, Gold River suffered. There was only one little café, no place to stay, and of course, no beer parlour or cocktail lounge for the workers. It was difficult for Tahsis Co. to recruit mill employees and managers to a town with little, if any, social life.

Gold River Chalet

The Gold River Chalet was brand new, designed by hotel architect Reno Negrin of Vancouver. Negrin designed many, many hotels — including what is now the Hilton Toronto — and university residences. 

The Chalet had 50 rooms, 25 upstairs and 25 downstairs. It offered a beautiful cocktail lounge overlooking the Gold River Valley, large beer parlour, restaurant, cafeteria, large meeting room, gift shop, and a pool. 

When Pattison closed the new hotel, National Caterers negotiated to close its Heber Lodge camp and move 50 of the men. They moved into the chalet's 25 downstairs rooms, with the contract providing the underlying financial support.

With that agreement, the first true Coast Hotels property was acquired. The deal was finalized in September 1972 and TD Bank provided a 15-year, interest-free mortgage for 100% of the purchase price. The 50-man worker contract guaranteed the loan. Coast Hotels then began a room renovation to facilitate the workers comfortably living two to a room.

Gold River Chalet opened with no TVs or in-room phones, as Coast Hotels had a very lean budget at the time. The cafeteria, however, operated 24 hours a day for the shift workers and also delivered hot dishes to the mill's kitchen for overtime meals around the clock. The hotel also had a resident fishing guide, renowned local Steelhead sportsman Tim Timmons, who guided Canada's then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in Gold River. 

The hotel reserved one suite for visiting Tahsis Co. executives. Being that finances were limited, Jack bought the suite's furniture from an antique store in West Vancouver. Eventually, a 50-room annex was built to house additional workers during quarterly mill maintenance shutdowns. The shutdowns would fill the hotel beyond capacity and travel costs to Campbell River were prohibitive. 

Pulp and Paper workers eventually unionized the hotel, just as they had Heber Lodge and the mill itself. Wages were 20% higher than the Hotel Workers Local 835 union. 

From Chalet to Coast Hotel

The first manager of the new Coast Gold River Hotel was Mr. Stuart Lloyd, who, along with Rob, graduated from BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology) Hotel School in the spring of 1972. Stuart was a married adult student who had children and commuted back and forth to Vancouver.

By spring of 1973, his wife put her foot down about the commute and Rob was chosen to go to Gold River in his place. Rob and his new wife, Bev, moved to Gold River and remained there for 15 months until the hotel was in good working order. 

Looking Back

In retrospect, Tahsis Co. needed a hotel in Gold River and its employees housed in first-class facilities. Everyone benefited from it and Jack and Rob turned a camp contract into the foundation of what was to become a world-class hotel company. Coast Hotels' premise was (and still is) simple: in each town served by Coast Hotels, the hotel would be the very best and provide services to both the travelling public and the local industry. This, in turn, would build and ensure customer loyalty.

The REAL First Coast Hotel

Interestingly, Gold River wasn't technically the first Coast Hotel.

In early 1972, Jack was negotiating the deal with Tahsis Co. to buy the chalet from Delta Hotels. Jack didn't have much money, so he rolled a new man camp contract in Geraldton, Ontario, into his new company — Coast Hotels. This allowed him to have some profit outside of National Caterers, to provide working capital to open the new hotel. 

Finally in 1973, Coast bought the chalet from Delta Hotels, along with a shopping centre and apartments 30 miles up Nootka Sound from Gold River. Delta was in financial trouble, raising money and getting rid of debt, so Rob flew in with his TD banker and bought the hotel. 

Fast-forward 10 years and this all set Coast Hotels up to buy the Campbell River Discovery Inn, Kamloops Canadian Inn, and the Inn of the North in Prince George from Delta Hotels. The O'Neills had some profits to spend after some very successful pipeline camp jobs. 

But that's another story for another time. 

A Few Interesting Vignettes About the Origins of Coast Hotels

• Jack invented Coast's swirl "C" logo himself. Rob remembers him doodling at his desk trying to get it just right.

• The original pulp mill manager, Billy-Wade Smith, was from Alabama and had a thick Southern accent. His wife, whose accent was just as thick, became famous in the community for her response to the local newspaper. When asked what she thought of the horrible pulp smell that rose from the valley each afternoon, she retorted that she "liked it...it was the smell of money."

• Roderick Haig Brown was a famous naturalist who also happened to be the local district judge. Rob often visited him in court trying to sort out pub brawls that happened at the hotel between loggers and fishermen. 

• The O'Neill family sold the Gold River hotel to Tokyo's Okabe Co. in 1989, after it had been shut down for an extensive period of time due to a labour strike. 

• The hotel partially burned down about 15 years ago, destroying the meeting space, kitchens, bar, and pub. It was partially rebuilt and still operates today.