A local hotel developer plans to bring an upscale extended-stay or an all-suites style national chain hotel to Jonesboro by mid-2008.

Hemant Patel, whose family owns the Hampton Inn hotel on Phillips Drive, said he and his brother, Jay, are in discussions with several hotel franchises on a deal to build an $8 million, 100 room hotel on Sunny Meadow Drive off South Caraway Road.

"We're still working with a couple of franchises on the brand," Patel said.  "We've already got financing secured to go ahead and get started."

The family owns several hotels in Arkansas, including Holiday Inn at Osceola, Comfort Suites at Little Rock, and Days Inn at Forrest City.  The Patels used to own the Econo Lodge at Jonesboro.

Patel said they haven't been able to get their first choice for the franchise in Jonesboro, but the property in Jonesboro most likely will be something similar in style to the MainStay Suites that they are building in Northwest Arkansas.

"Once we complete that, we will know which direction we want to go," Patel said.  "If we do something, we're going to do something in that neighborhood."

Patel bought the 2.2 acres on Sunny Meadow Drive next to the Malco Hollywood 12 Cinema in 2006 from developer Kent Arnold.

"We really like that location," Patel said.  "We're kind of away from most of the other hotels.  We want this to be a little different."

Competition Under Way

The new hotel project would be the latest in a recent spate of up-scale and suite-style hotel chains coming to the Jonesboro market.

Site work is already under way on a 100 room Hilton Garden Inn on the former Lowe's of Jonesboro property in the 2800 block of South Caraway Road and Fair Park Boulevard.  In May, InterContinental Hotel Group announced it would build an 80-room Candlewood Suites at the intersection of Kazi Street and Phillips Drive.  And in June, Junior Das, who owns the Super 8 and Econo Lodge, signed a contract with Choice Hotels International to build an 80-room Comfort Suites on three acres on Middlefield Road.

Jonesboro has about 1,300 hotel rooms, according to figures from the Jonesboro Regional Chamber of Commerce.

"The new thing is to build suite hotels," Arnold said.

Arnold, who bought 100 acres on the east side of South Caraway Road in the 1980s when it was a gravel road and developed most of the housing tracts along that roadway, said the location on Sunny Meadow Drive is ideal for a hotel of that type because it is near restaurants and the movie theater and has great potential to see development in the near future.

He recently closed a deal for the property adjacent to the proposed hotel site on the Parker Road side facing Colton's Steak House and Grill.

"It's a great location," Arnold said.  "All that area with all of the improvements and all those restaurants will continue to fill in.  That little commercial node is a very popular and high-traffic area.  If you were traveling you wouldn't mind going over there for any reason.  That overpass has really spurred that development."

Patel said they hope to break ground on the project within the next six to eight months.