Washington’s long-anticipated $537 million convention center hotel is slated to break ground Wednesday, a development that many say will help the city draw more big-name conventions and generate millions more in annual visitor spending.
The Marriott Marquis Headquarters Hotel will increase the number of hotel rooms within two blocks of the convention center to a total of more than 3,150 — an increase of more than a third.
The 1,167-room hotel, which will be built across the street from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, will be attached to the center — a major selling point for meeting planners and something officials believe can attract more major conventions.
The District now hosts roughly 15 citywide conventions a year and “20 in a good year,” according to Greg O’Dell, CEO of the Washington Convention and Sports Authority.
“We’ll be pushing for between 20 and 25 citywides for sure [with the new hotel],” he said, noting D.C. stands to steal conventions from East Coast competitors such as Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston.
D.C.’s number of adjacent hotel rooms would also beat out the Gaylord National Harbor and Baltimore’s roughly 2,000, but O’Dell said those destinations compete with D.C. for smaller conventions.
The hotel is slated to finish in 2014, but many conventions book years in advance. O’Dell said the first agreement could be booked soon after the groundbreaking.
The new business could mean as much as $100 million in additional visitor spending, boosting the annual impact of conventions to $500 million.
The hotel’s opening will come more than a decade later than city officials had hoped. The city has been pursuing a convention center hotel since before the $800 million convention center opened at Mount Vernon Square in 2003.
Convention center officials have long argued an attached hotel would mean convenience and save meeting planners money by not requiring shuttle service — the selling point D.C. needs to draw the most desirable conventions, O’Dell said.
But the originally proposed 1,400-room, $750 million mega-hotel ran into development and financing issues. Then when the proposal was scaled back, the project hit another snare: Developer JBG sued the city to reopen the bidding. The suit settled but delayed the project several months.
“It’s almost taking longer to build than it did to build the convention center,” said Emily Durso, president of the Hotel Association of Washington, D.C. “It was a very long, complicated deal. … Everybody’s intentions were good, it just takes a while.”
And as for the hotels already within walking distance of the center, Durso said they welcome the new business.
“Managers have always been 100 percent behind this — all boats rise,” she said. “They’re big-picture guys. One new convention a year is $40 million [in additional] spending. So they all benefit.”
