Dueling hotels

John Q. Hammons, the nation's largest Holiday Inn franchise holder, is building a 300-room, 30,000-square-foot hotel and trade center in Middleton. Scheduled to open in March 1990, it is already raising hackles in local hospitality and convention circles, editor Marc Eisen reports. "I think it's going to be difficult to compete with Hammons," says Lynn Russell, president of the Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau. City and county convention facilities have "a bigger operating overhead than a privately owned facility like Hammons'," she adds. Calling Hammons "a direct competitor," the Concourse Hotel's Darrell Wild fumes that he'd have his own new exhibition space ready within a year if the city hadn't dragged its feet over his project while pondering its own ambitions for a Law Park convention center. The Concourse survives 1990 and perseveres today. Hammons' Holiday Inn is now a Marriott, but remains part of the Hammons group.