It’s been some time since we talked about the anticipated new Mahalo Hotel coming to the Wildwoods.
Back in July 2019, we reported that the Ocean Holiday Motel. Located at 6501 Ocean Ave in Wildwood Crest, was sold to ICONA for $4.55 Million.
For those who don’t know ICONA, they operate many resorts at the Jersey shore including, ICONA Avalon, Windrift, ICONA Cape May, and ICONA Diamond Beach. On top of this, they just announced a new 7-story hotel in Cape May at the old Beach Theater plus it’s rumored that they purchased another hotel in Wildwood Crest.
In November 2019, ICONA reveals that they would be turning the Ocean Holiday into a new brand hotel called Mahalo Hotel.
This brand would be, according to the CEO of ICONA Resorts, Eustace Mita, a hospitality brand that would be along the lines of a Marriott Courtyard.
The blueprints, which you can see by clicking HERE, show that they would be adding 15 rooms on the North-West side of the property which will bring the room total to 70 and build a massive waterpark structure that includes two slides, water cannons, and a dump bucket.
That winter construction started at the project which saw the crews take the building all the way down to its walls.
The pool, second-story deck, the office, and more were removed to make room for the hotel but then the project was paused due to not only the pandemic but other reasons.
For almost over a year we have heard your questions weekly about when will this project start back up.
Today we can finally start looking at a timeline, kind of.
You see, it looks like the project is ready to go back to the building but the one thing that’s holding it up is CARFA. (you knew that was coming).
CAFRA stands for the Coastal Area Facility Review Act. This act was installed in 1973 as a way to protect and regulate the Division of Land in areas that are within X amount of distance from the beach. Bottom line, it’s a permit the state issues after the site is considered safe for the environment.
Many projects down here, including the Residences at Pacific, have been put on hold until the state could approve them.
These permits do take anywhere from 5 months to 9 months to get approved.
What we just learned was that Mahalo Hotels, LLC put in a CAFRA application this past June. This means that if approved, we could see construction start back up the earliest in November and the latest in March.
We will be keeping you updated on this project in our monthly Wildwood Video Construction updates.
