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MILITARY LODGING
Lodging
Upgrades AT KODIAK GUEST HOUSE
The Guest House at U.S. Coast Guard Base Kodiak in Alaska
recently underwent a $55,000 refresh.
The work was done under the leadership of Jen Aldrete,
Guest House manager, who took the position in time for the
project to begin. “We did all of the renovations in the past
year,” she said. “They knew that they were going to purchase
these items, it is just that none of it was done yet. I had the pop out to you. If you have a poor-looking bed, everything
privilege — and I say privilege because this was really fun
— to purchase these items, and do the staging at the hotel
and getting it done.”
Aldrete said that certain areas were in need of renovation.
“Things were getting old, like mattresses and other things,
and it was time to refresh. We have beautiful lodge-themed
furniture in the room with logs. It was time to refresh every-
thing else and just make those rooms pop. We still have the
lodge theme, with the really thick-type of beds, and desks,
and chairs. We’ve just upgraded the things around it.”
The room refresh included new mattresses.
18 MILITARY CLUB & HOSPITALITY | FEBRUARY 2017
New mattresses were a big part of the refresh. “The bed
is such a big deal in the room,” she said. “They are standard
hotel rooms, and you have to be really creative when it comes
to that, because you don’t have a living room to play with and
we don’t have hot tubs in our rooms. When you first go into
a hotel room, the first thing you see is the bed. That needs to
else looks dull. When you walk into our rooms, you see this
huge bed. My thing has always been, does a person want to
dive into bed? They should want to dive into this really neat
bed. My focus on that is that it has to pop when you walk in.”
The mattresses, which were purchased through the Coast
Guard Exchange System, feature pillow tops. “They are pretty
tall,” said Aldrete. “From there we decided to do the pillows.
They are very fluffy.”
With the new, thicker mattresses, new linens were needed.
“We had to change our linens because with pillow tops, we had
to get a deeper pocket linen,” she said. “We got
our linens from American Hotel Register,
who I have worked with for years and
have been used here in the past. They
are great to work with. They turned
around our linens before we got the
mattresses.”
The rooms also feature the Oxy-
gen Collection of amenities from
American Hotel Register.
Another change was made in
the guest rooms due to the region’s
shorter periods of sunlight during
certain times of the year. “We put
nightlights in the room,” said Al-
drete. “There is not a lot of lighting
outside. What we have done is put
LED nightlights inside the rooms to
give guests a pathway to the bathroom.”