The Westgate Hotel Revenue and Competitors

Plans for The Westgate Hotel (what was then called The Westgate Plaza Hotel) began in the early '60s with a dinner conversation between the late President Eisenhower and C. Arnholt Smith, a local banker and financier. "Is this the best hotel you have in San Diego?" Eisenhower asked. History fails to record the hotel in which the remark was made, but the latest downtown hotel had been built thirty-five years before; and Smith -- a native San Diego Rags-to-Riches success story -- took it as a personal challenge, and the Westgate-California Corporation, the conglomerate he headed, undertook the launching of a new hotel. It would be a complete anachronism and denial of all the principles of hotel cost accounting! "The Westgate" would be a modern hotel designed along the lines of the classical European hotel palaces de grand luxe. Richard George Wheeler & Associates, in partnership with Fujimoto & Fish, A.I.A designed the hotel. It was built by Southcoast and Riha Construction at a cost of $14.5 million. When the Westgate Plaza Hotel was built in 1970, it was the most expensive hotel built in the country.