After eight months of renovations, former Comfort Inn set to reopen Friday as AmericInn

QUINCY — The former Comfort Inn at 4122 Broadway, closed since it was sold in February, will reopen Friday as an AmericInn Lodge and Suites.

Shil Patel said he and his father, Sunny, bought the 58-room facility in February for $1.1 million. He says they’ve spent $700,000 in renovations.

“We’re just waiting on some of our AmericInn signage to come in and some of our AmericInn furniture,” Shil Patel said. “Other than that, almost everything else is pretty much finished.”

Asked what had been done to the facility, Shil replied, “The better question is: What have I not done? All I’ve done was just keep the walls. Other than that, we have changed absolutely everything.”

The Patels also own the Quincy Inn and Suites, 224 N. 36th. Sunny has been in the hotel business for 25 years. Shil, 23, will help run both properties.

Broadway hotel will be ninth AmericInn in Illinois

“Quincy Inn and Suites is right down the road, and we got this (hotel) at an auction for a good price,” Shil said. “Quincy is a relatively good place to invest money. It’s always staying really busy throughout the year, and compared to other Illinois cities like Springfield, Bloomington and Peoria, where those markets are dying very quickly. We actually had a hotel in Springfield, but we sold that one just to get out of that market. Quincy has been very, very good.”

The AmericInn franchise was founded in 1984 in Minnesota and purchased by Wyndham in 2017. The website shows 204 locations across the country in 20 states, mostly in the Midwest. AmericInn hotels are most plentiful in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The Quincy facility will be the ninth AmericInn hotel in Illinois. Others are in Fulton, Galesburg, Kewanee, Moline, Monmouth, Oswego, Princeton and Streator. The Quincy property is not yet listed on the website.

“We actually were planning to become a Best Western at first when we bought the property,” Shil said. “Best Western is a very good company, and they’re very strong with their corporate clientele. That’s what we were really needing. 

“A couple months down the road, Best Western started to not want to negotiate with us and give us a deal that we wanted. My uncle in Branson, Mo., was actually operating an AmericInn, so he called me and he said, ‘If you’re not going with Best Western, let’s get two hotels under Wyndham. They might give us a good deal.’ We agreed on all the terms and all the conditions. Everything looked good to me and my dad, and everything was looking good to AmericInn.”

Shil Patel: ‘We completely changed everything’

Holly Cain, executive director of the Quincy Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, says the number of hotel rooms available in Quincy is at 798. The 58 rooms at the AmericInn are part of that count this year, even when the hotel was closed.

Quincy Mayor Mike Troup recently told the Fire and Police Commission he is working with four hotel developers to bring a new hotel to the city. Also, Tanninger Companies of Tulsa, Okla., acquired the Illinois State Bank building, 529 Hampshire, in July. Tanninger Companies is run by Ryan Jude Tanner and Jay Krottinger. Plans for the seven-story building include a 25-room boutique hotel.

Shil said the hotel pool has been closed since 2019, but it should be open next week. A hot tub that was in the Comfort Inn has been replaced by a breakfast room.

He said the decision was made to shut down the hotel in February rather than keep it open while renovations were made.

“That way we could just focus on renovating the hotel,” Shil said. “We completely changed everything.”