Take a look at this newly renovated Myrtle Beach oceanfront Hilton hotel. What changed?

Greg Hussar’s ‘three-hour tour’ around The Ellie Beach Resort is much more pleasant than the seven-stranded castaways on Gilligan’s Island.

For one thing, there’s no shipwreck involved at the Tapestry by Hilton Hotels property, and for another, Hussar had a story for several stops along the tour.

At the Springmaid Pier, Hussar points out familiar faces fishing and the ocean and also mentions that in 2016, the destination re-opened following a renovation. A short while later, Hurricane Matthew barreled past the Grand Strand, obliterating the newly renovated pier, which only re-opened in 2020, four years later.

The director of sales and marketing at DoubleTree Resort by Hilton occupies the same property as The Ellie.

Yet his overarching tale, as he showed The Sun News around the more-than-half-century-old oceanfront resort in Myrtle Beach, was about the completed renovation and the many changes planned for the property.

The Ellie Beach Resort at 3200 South Ocean Blvd. in Myrtle Beach, operated in concert with its neighbor DoubleTree Resort, holds its grand opening on July 25, 2024.

Since mid-October 2023, when work on Ellie began, a lot has changed at the 238-room property. The guest rooms received a makeover, including making rooms with two king-sized beds instead of the standard queen-size and bunk bed options for visitors with kids. The four ballrooms and exhibition halls, more than 32,000 square feet large, were renovated from top to bottom. A coffee shop and market closed during the pandemic were re-opened, and The Ellie added three water slides.

The pools were also replastered, cabanas and a new poolside bar were added, a new infinity pool was added along with an outdoor wedding and special events lawn, and an outdoor amenity center featuring 20 rentable electric scooters, pool and ping-pong tables, two horseshoe pits, and other activities were among the total facelift to the property.

According to DoubleTree Resort General Manager Jan McCormick, the entire overhaul of The Ellie Beach Resort cost 10s of millions of dollars and is part of several phases of renovations to the property. According to Horry County Land Records, the entire resort property had close to $79 million worth of improvement in 2023 and 2024; the current value of the 27-acre property is close to $99 million.

“You’ve got 30 acres of prime real estate in Myrtle Beach on the water,” McCormick said. “So they see tremendous opportunity for future development here.”

The next phase, expected to start in the fall of 2024, will see new amenities on the property, such as a hot tub and a 10-foot lazy river. The Ellie’s upgrades were preceded by a change in ownership for the entire property and a need to overhaul it.

In 2022, the Chicago-based Singerman Real Estate (also known as SRE) purchased The Ellie and Double Tree property for more than $66 million, according to Horry County Land Records. Singerman Real Estate purchased the resort via the SRE Seahawk Owner LLC entity, which shares the same business address as Singerman, according to the firm’s LinkedIn.

When SRE purchased the property, the hotel had not been renovated since 2015 and needed updating. Looking to reinvigorate the property, SRE invested in a full-scale renovation of the massive complex.

“It clearly needed a lot of TLC,” McCormick added.

Part of the objective of the massive repairs was to keep guests on the property with more amenities and attract locals to events and activities they could enjoy.

Hussar said the special events lawn hosts regular yoga sessions run by Sea Yoga. McCormick adds that the resort is considering a membership package for locals to enjoy the new water slides and water park features.

The renovation and branding as a Hilton Tapestry product, Hilton’s line of independent hotels with more than 125 locations, comes as more name-brand resorts start opening along the Grand Strand, compared to the traditional mom-and-pop owned properties.

Next door to The Ellie, Holiday Inn opened a new hotel catering to visitors looking for more space. The Sandcastle Oceanfront Resort at the Pavilion in downtown Myrtle Beach will undergo renovations and rebrand into a Voco by IHG Hotels & Resorts, one of the company’s more up-scale brands.

McCormick said that vacationers in the Myrtle Beach area aren’t tied to particular hotel brands over locally owned motels and hotels. However, Hussar added that some visitors crave a more high-end experience, creating a market for places like The Ellie.

“Myrtle Beach market is still an economy brand market. It’s a blue-collar market for guests to come to. A majority of the hotels still fall into that offerings,” Hussar said. “For those of us offering more upscale, I think that gives us an edge.”