A Ceres Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting will take place at 3:30 p.m. Thursday this week to officially open Woodspring Inn & Suites in Ceres.
The event will offer food, prizes and tours of the new four-story hotel located in the Ceres Gateway Center, 4195 Mitchell Road.
Work on the hotel began in 2023 by its corporate owner, Choice Hotels International.
The extended stay hotel consists of 122 rooms, giving visitors and travelers on Highway 99 with tighter budgets a new place to stay.
Woodspring is the third hotel in Ceres but the largest at 50,800 square feet and taller than the three-story Microtel Inn. Ceres’ oldest motel, the Howard Johnson Inn, is comprised of a single-story motel with one standalone building of two stories.
While Woodspring has nearly 300 hotels across the nation, it is not a well-known brand in California where there are just nine – Ceres, two in Bakersfield, and in Indio, Colton, Corona, Coachella Valley, Los Angeles and Moreno Valley. The chain was founded as Value Place in 2003 but rebranded to Woodspring in April 2015. The chain offers normal and extended stays. According to the company’s website, its guests “tend to book with us for a week, month, or longer. Since we have less turn-over, we pass the savings on to you with weekly and monthly rates that cost less per night the longer you stay!”
The hotels offer kitchens, laundry vending services and gyms.
The Woodspring project almost wasn’t approved approved in September 2022. Early in 2022, knowing that Woodspring would only build only a four-story hotel of 50 feet high, the Ceres City Council appeared unwilling to amend zoning regulations that set a height limit of 35 feet for buildings in the Regional Commercial, or RC zone. Woodspring said without a compromise, the project would be abandoned. When then Councilman Mike Kline abandoned his objections after he was shown the hotel would not block the freeway view of the nearby Walmart Supercenter, the council amended the zoning code to allow the four-story structure.
The Chamber will also host a grand re-opening celebration of Corazon Azteca, 3006 Fourth Street, at 5 p.m. today (Wednesday).
