Covington’s Hampton Inn is set to open on Sept. 1, and already more than 300 job-starved residents have applied to work at the hotel.

Navin Shah, owner of the Conyers and Covington Hampton Inn, said the company originally planned to have a job fair but the flood of applications has most likely made a fair unnecessary.

"Interest in the hotel has been so extreme and we’ve been so inundated with applications," said Susan Crowell, Conyers Hampton Inn general manager. "I’m just now starting to sift through the 300 applications to call potential employees"

She said anyone is welcome to come to the Conyers Hampton Inn location to pick up or fill out job applications; applicants should bring a resume. Eventually the Covington location will employ 30 people, but until business is established the hotel will have around 10 employees and some of those initial employees will come from Conyers. According to Shah all the employees will come from the local area.

Shah said he is opening the Covington location because he saw a good business opportunity after a feasibility study was completed several years ago.

The land for the hotel was purchased when the Wal-Mart on Industrial Boulevard was still in the planning phase. The Conyers Hampton Inn is located at an intersection of Interstate 20, Wal-Mart and Home Depot and because the Covington location would include those same elements, executives thought it was a winning combination.

"Because we were doing reasonably decent in Conyers we wanted to go east because we wanted to capture the people coming west into Atlanta," Shah said.

Both Crowell and Shah said they are excited to being working with the Covington community.

"The Chamber (of Commerce) has been awesome; Clara (Deemer) and John (Boothby) have been so helpful. We’re looking forward to working with Recreation Commission and business community and the Lochridge Industrial Park is close," Crowell said. "I think it will be a wonderful partnership."

The six-story Covington Hampton Inn will be located at 14460 Paras Drive NE and will feature the full range of amenities. The hotel will have 105 rooms, 1325 square feet of meeting space, outdoor swimming pools, free wireless internet, refrigerators, microwaves and LCD flat screen TVs in every room, complimentary hot breakfast, a spacious lobby designed to be regularly used by visitors and a state-of-the-art fitness room, Crowell said.

Shah said the total cost of construction for the Covington Hampton Inn is between $10 million and $11 million.