Gary Brandeis, founder and chief executive officer of the Scholar Hotel Group, is a seasoned veteran of the hospitality business.
But as a Penn State alumnus, renovating and reopening the Nittany Lion Inn hit differently for him.
“I could have done this project at another university but I wouldn’t have put as much heart and soul and sweat into it,” he says. “I would have cared, but I wouldn’t have had the burden of millions of Penn State people saying, ‘Don’t mess this up, Gary.’
“I felt that in a good way.”
A few months after the inn’s reopening in September, early evidence suggests that Brandeis and his group most certainly did not “mess this up.”
After being closed to guests for four years, the hotel is busy again with overnight visitors and locals stopping by for dinner, drinks, or to sip coffee in one of the new lobby’s many seating nooks.
And as December arrives, Scholar is set to begin renovations at the university’s other hotel property, the Penn Stater. The 300 guest rooms, conference and meeting spaces, two restaurants, and lobby will be updated in phases while the facility remains open.
Brandeis acknowledges there are “bumps in the road” as the Nittany Lion Inn gets up to speed as essentially a “brand-new hotel” in an “old, complicated” building that opened in 1931 (with subsequent construction in the 1950s and 1990s). But, he says, there is not another university in the country that boasts a nicer on-campus hotel.
“I don’t think anybody touches us.”
The 240-room inn is now at a five-star level and can serve as a catalyst to bring more visitors to the community, he says.
“We honored the tradition of the building. The Nittany Lion Inn brand is really, really important. We wanted to make sure that we protected that brand and developed this asset with the history of the university, the soul of the university in this building. I think we did it.”
After renovations, the Penn Stater will be “one of the best conference center hotels in the state,” he adds.
The university sold the two campus hotel buildings to Scholar Hotel Group in 2022. Penn State retains ownership of the land, with Scholar holding a long-term ground lease.
Scholar focuses on hotels in university communities, including Syracuse, West Virginia (Morgantown), and Radford University in Virginia. In State College, the group also owns the Scholar Hotel, Hyatt Place, Courtyard by Mariott, and Residence Inn by Mariott.
Brandeis, a member of Penn State’s Class of 1988 who grew up in suburban Philadelphia, says his close tie to the Penn State and State College communities all these years later is a “dream come true for me, certainly the most rewarding part of my career.”
Brandeis spoke with Town&Gown in mid-October in the spacious lobby of the Nittany Lion Inn, which bustled with activity even on a weekday morning. Here is more from our conversation:
What kind of feedback are you hearing since reopening the inn?
Brandeis: So far, really good. What’s great about the Nittany Lion Inn is people loved this building and this hotel before [the renovations]. And if I may say this, it wasn’t in such great condition, right? But the people still loved her. And so, I think what we’re seeing is people still have this warm place in their heart about the building and the hotel. And when they come in and they see what we’ve done, it kind of elevates from there.
One of the most fun things to do, especially on a busy weekend, is just to hang out by the front door and watch people walk in here that haven’t walked in before in the new building, and see their face when they see what we did to the lobby and how we opened it up and we opened up the courtyard and brought light in and things like that. So overall, we’ve gotten some really good feedback, both on the physical renovations and on the level of service we’re providing.
Now, granted, we have a long way to go. We have to improve the level of service, the way we check people in and manage rooms, and we need to make sure the heating and air conditioning is working all the time. We need to deliver food faster and get the bar quicker and things like that. But it’s a brand-new building and it’s going to take a little bit of time. What I really appreciate about the community is that people have been pretty kind to us on social media, which is a tough place to be sometimes, but they’ve also been patient with us and I think that’s been great.
What is coming across as most popular?
Brandeis: Well, when we were under renovation, people were very adamant that we have apples at the front door and that we have lobster bisque in the restaurant [as in the past]. So, we have those two things. … I think people like the fact that there’s great spaces to hang out. We have this big lobby with lots of seating. We have a great coffee shop now [Dear Joe] so guests can come down in the morning and grab a coffee and a donut or something with their laptop or their phone and either do some work or catch up with friends. The Nittany Lion Inn didn’t have those spaces before.
We have the old Whiskers space [serving casual fare], which is now called Triplett’s in honor and memory of Wally Triplett, a well-known football player here at Penn State. And we took the old alumni room, which is sort of the most historic room in the building, and turned that into another [more upscale] cocktail lounge [called 1855]. … And then Lionne is a little bit more upscale, full-service restaurant. The four outlets are very different from each other and they serve different wants of the guests.
What was your broader vision when you took on this project?
Brandeis: We knew that the building needed a lot of work, behind the walls and in front of the walls. So, we had to solve a lot of mechanical system issues and things that guests don’t see but guests need like heating and air conditioning and hot water and water pressure. … And then, when you fix all those systems, the things that are behind the walls, what’s the guest experience, from what they see and feel and touch when they’re in the building?
We wanted this to be a five-star hotel. We wanted this to be the nicest university hotel in the country. We wanted it to be the nicest hotel between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Those were our overall goals. I think we’ve achieved those. There’s not another university in the United States that has a nicer hotel on their college campus than the Nittany Lion Inn, and that’s from the quality of our common and public spaces, the quality of our guest rooms, the quality of our food and beverage, the grounds. And then when you add great service on top of that, I don’t think anybody touches us.
The question for the greater Penn State community, the greater State College community, is: How does everyone want to use this building, this asset, this economic opportunity, to help drive more opportunities for the State College community?
How can this hotel create more economic development opportunity for the university? How can this building continue to move the university’s goals of education and research forward? Can this building help raise more money for the university? Things like that. How can we partner with other great assets in the community, like the Arboretum and the Palmer Museum, to create great experiences for people that come to the area?
Those were our broader goals. I think we’ve achieved the first part by creating a great building, and then creating partnerships with all the great assets in the community is going to be really cool.
Is that part of the strategy in terms of filling this building when you don’t have a big community event?
Brandeis: We can’t rest on our busy weekends. If this hotel is going to be successful, we have to be successful fifty-two weeks a year, Sunday through Thursday as well as the weekends. So, creating those partnerships, creating social events, creating business meeting opportunities, having people come here all throughout the year for various reasons why they need to be in State College.
We also think that we can create this hotel as a destination opportunity. There’s a lot of people that love to go to great hotels and then go to great museums and eat great food. And if you think about a two- or three-hour drive from State College, you have Pittsburgh, you have Philadelphia, Baltimore; Washington, New York, maybe four hours. So, there’s a lot of people, 50 million people or more, that live within a three- or four-hour drive from State College that would love to come to a great college town with a great hotel, with a great museum, great food and beverage, great outdoor things to do. We think the Nittany Lion Inn can be a catalyst to bringing more people to the community, because there are certain people that want that five-star experience, and Penn State and State College didn’t have it until now.
You’re planning some renovations at the Penn Stater as well?
Brandeis: We are. When we closed the transaction with the university, it was a two-building deal. The goal was to get the Nittany Lion Inn done first, get this building back in service for the university and the community, and then focus on the Penn Stater. We’ve been operating the Penn Stater kind of as it was, as it is. We didn’t make any real physical changes, at least anything big that people might notice, but we have been in the planning stages for the last six months or so and our plan is to start construction in December, get all the guest rooms renovated by the end of the summer of ’25 in addition to all the common areas like the conference and meeting rooms.
And then once we get the conference and meeting space done and the guest rooms done, we’re going to do some public area upgrades as well. The lobby, the desk. We’re going to add a coffee shop in the lobby of the Penn Stater, which we think is desperately needed. And we’re going to renovate the Legends and The Gardens restaurants as well, and just upgrade the whole property [in phases, while the hotel remains open].
Once we do that, kind of toward the end of ’25 and the beginning of 2026, I think Penn State and central Pennsylvania and State College is going to have one of the best conference center hotels in the state. And I think the Penn Stater is going to be able to compete with the Hotel Hershey [and] the full-service Marriott in Lancaster. As the Penn Stater gets renovated, we’re also going to elevate the type of business we go after. Right now, the Penn Stater serves sort of the middle market. I think once we’re done with renovations, the Penn Stater can start looking at not only the middle market, but the upper-scale market as well for conferences.
How different is the Penn Stater going to be?
Brandeis: It’s going to look different. That’s a newer building (mid-1990s), so there’s not as much work behind the walls as we did here at the Nittany Lion Inn. It’s a more cosmetic sort of refresh. We’ll have all new guest rooms, all new guest bathrooms. They’ll be ripped up and rebuilt from scratch. New paint, carpet, wall coverings, things like that. New lighting. All the conference and meeting spaces will be refreshed with new color palettes and carpet, vinyl, new technology, things like that. We’ll redesign the lobby, make it a little bit warmer, create some energy and vitality in the lobby.
Do you plan to change the motifs or the food in the Penn Stater’s restaurants?
Brandeis: Maybe not the motifs, but we’re definitely going to upgrade the look and feel of those food and beverage outlets. Because it’s a conference center hotel, you need certain kinds of food and beverage outlets that can handle a lot of people in and out at the same time. And so, we’ll have to maintain the basic structure of those food and beverage outlets, but we’re definitely going to upgrade them in a big way. And while we’re upgrading them, we’ll change menus and we’ll change offerings as well. … We’ll keep the classics, kind of like we tried to do here at the Nittany Lion Inn, but we’ll mix up the menu.
Do you have many students who work as interns?
Brandeis: We do. If you’re a hospitality major, you need 1,000 hours of work experience to graduate. The side effects are very good for our business, because we do have a lot of students that work in all of our hotels because they need to get those hours. In addition to that, now that we have a lot of assets here, students can get experience in lots of different property types. We have a full-service, five-star hotel with four food and beverage outlets. That’s a unique asset class. We have a 300-room conference center hotel. We have a full-service branded hotel downtown at the Hyatt; we have a boutique branded hotel with the Scholar. And then we also have sort of a traditional Courtyard and Residence Inn that you can find in any market.
The opportunity we have with Penn State students is that they can work in lots of different property types, and that’s really interesting and unique. What we’d like to do, and what we’re talking to the university about, is creating sort of a rotational internship program where students get experience in all the different hotel types, which when they graduate would give them a really broad level of experience and an experience they probably can’t get at another university. T&GMark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown
