General manager Rick Rautanen's phone rang every 10 minutes as he took Central Michigan Life on a tour of Courtyard Mount Pleasant at Central Michigan University. Workers were being trained at the nearly complete facility, construction workers adding finishing touches and housekeepers in a daily battle with the constantly settling dust that comes with a newly built structure.

The Marriott hotel's grand opening is Aug. 16. This week is crunch time — in just five days the hotel and staff face inspections.

"It's organized chaos," Rautanen, former Mount Pleasant assistant mayor, said. "Especially as you get into the last month, because you're trying to get all the last little details down."

The six-story hotel standing northeast of Kelly/Shorts Stadium will be inspected on July 13 by Marriott corporate officials. If it is deemed inline with Marriott's branding requirements — as specific as how an alcoholic beverage at the hotel bar is mixed — the hotel will be opened to the public.

Construction on the 148 room hotel began in 2014. The project's $15 million cost is funded entirely by Lodgco Hospitality, a Mount Pleasant-based company. Operation of the hotel will earn CMU $5.25 million over a 30-year span, as part of the contract leasing the land to Lodgco. The additional hotel rooms will help the community accommodate visitors during busy weekends.

“Adding another hotel to the mix will help on sold-out weekends and peak times of the year such as CMU graduation and home football games,” said Chris Rowley, executive director of the Mount Pleasant Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. “The Courtyard by Marriott at Central Michigan University will give visitors another option to stay when in Mount Pleasant.”

Walking into the hotel, the lobby features a snack market, sectioned off small-group meeting areas with individual televisions, a condensed Starbucks coffee shop, a full bar and business area for reading and printing. From the lobby heading down a hallway to the building's southwest corner, there's a 280-person capacity conference room, which can be sectioned into three smaller conference rooms that each have dropdown screens for overhead projections. The area, adorned with photos from CMU's campus, includes a number of rooms, each named with a letter of the greek alphabet, conducive to board-style business meetings.

Because of the hotel's modern design, nearly every bedroom is shaped slightly different — some are long and narrow with an angled wall, for example. The rooms implement an open floor plan that traditional hotel rooms don't have. The hotel also features a swimming pool and hot tub, workout facility and outdoor fire pit and patio.

The hotel will employ around 100 people, Rautanen said. CMU students will be hired to fill half of those staff positions. The bulk of those student employees will be part of the university's hospitality program, though Rautanen said he may recruit other students such as business management majors.

"If you were an 18-year-old kid from California and decided 'Hey, I want to go to school for hospitality.' Cornell, Michigan State, Johnson and Wales pop up," he said. "What I would like to see down the road is when a kid has that idea, Central Michigan University is a choice. Hopefully, this (hotel) helps put CMU's hospitality program on the map. But the thing right now is, get the (hotel) open."

Inside the kitchen of Starbucks, fifth-year senior hospitality major Kayla Anderson, of Waterford, was in a training session. Anderson said students began orientation in June and helped assemble the hotel.

"It's really amazing to see everything you hear in the classroom and experience it, hands on, in here," she said. "We're moved around everywhere, so we've done a little bit of housekeeping, working (at Starbucks), customer service. I feel like getting into a brand new hotel, you learn more about different areas instead of just your area if you were came into an established hotel."

Of the 500 applications he received, Rautanen said he interviewed more than half of the students who applied. What's unique for these students, Rautanen said, is to be a part of the team opening the facility.

"Everybody who is here kind of has their fingerprint on everything from the start," he said.

To make a reservation or want more information, go here.