Development permit submitted for Sutton Place Hotel at Kelowna airport

The application process for a future hotel at Kelowna International Airport (YLW) officially began on Tuesday.

It was not secret, as the Sutton Place Hotel was unveiled by Northland Properties and Kelowna officials at YLW in January, but now a development permit has been submitted.

The papers filed by developer Northland Properties at Kelowna City Hall highlighted several things already unveiled regarding the highly-anticipated hotel, as well as a few variances.

When it does arrive on the desk of city council, they’ll need to approve variances for building height, canopy sign size and off-street loading spaces if they want to give this application the green light.

It’s unlikely any of those variances will provide hiccups during the approval process, as evidenced by Mayor Tom Dyas’ comments when the hotel was unveiled earlier this year.

"There's a lot of components to this that make this a very big deal for our community," he said at the Jan. 24 news conference. “I am confident this will be a very successful venture that will have a huge benefit throughout our region."

If approved by council, the six-storey Sutton Place Hotel would include 245 rooms, a restaurant and bar, a gym, a swimming pool and a conference centre.

There would be just under 195 surface level parking stalls for vehicles, meant for hotel and restaurant guests, but the major parking feature will be a neighbouring parkade.

The plan is to build a seven-storey parkade that would have 1,000 stalls, both for hotel guests and general travellers.

“The new parkade not only provides for part of the required parking stalls of the hotel and replaces the parking space lost due to the new buildings, but also provides additional parking spaces for the entire YLW complex,” says Northland Properties development application.

“It will be an efficient parking solution for YLW as it does not significantly increase the travel time from parking to the terminal, unlike building more ground parking spaces at a more remote location.”

Construction on the hotel won’t begin until it receives all the necessary approval from city hall and there’s no indication on how long that process will take.

However, at the January unveiling, it was communicated that the hope is for construction to begin as soon as early 2025 and the project completed around three years later, in 2028.