The Inn at Ole Miss Receives 4-1 Approval to Apply for Resort Status

The Inn At Ole Miss. Photo courtesy of Robert Jordan, Ole Miss Communications.

The Inn at Ole Miss received approval Monday to apply for qualified resort status in a 4-1 vote by the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors. 

Kirk Purdom, executive director of alumni affairs for the Ole Miss Alumni Association, which oversees the Inn, said that this would help keep the Inn at Ole Miss as significant as other hotels and conference centers in the area.

“The biggest thing that prompted us to seek resort status is that we want to be able to meet the needs of our clients for events,” Purdom said. “The University campus is in the county, and because of that we can’t have beer at our events.”
Purdom added that when the Inn first opened in 2008, it wasn’t really an issue because there weren’t a lot of other venues in town that could handle the types of events the Inn does.
“But in the last few years, with the opening of several other locations, we’ve lost some business, primarily because of our caterers not being able to serve beer. And we feel like we fit well within the definition of a qualified resort status and it gives us an opportunity to expand our offerings to our clients who are coming in and using our facilities, whether it be for a wedding reception or weddings, retreats for law firms and businesses. They want to have everything here under one roof.”
The Inn at Ole Miss uses third-party vendors (caterers) to handle any food and drink components of events, and if the resort status application is approved, this will permit vendors to offer beer to clients.
Purdom added that the next steps in the process of resort status are as follows:
Fill out the application and provide a legal description, which has to run in the Oxford Eagle for two consecutive weeks. After that, a certified copy will be collected from the Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, and a statement from Sheriff Buddy East.
“At that point, we’ll be in a position to submit the application and we’ll put together a packet like the one we put together for the Board of Supervisors, detailing the events and things that we do here on campus and how we would use resort status, and how it would benefit the Inn. Then we submit that to ABC, and I really have no idea how long it takes them to approve it. However, having the Board of Supervisors support our application helps us to speed this along a little bit.”

by Angela Rogalski, hottytoddy.com contributor
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