City hopes new hotels downtown will increase hospitality space, draw more business to area
A new Marriott Courtyard hotel is set to open downtown, the first new privately-owned tall building to go up in the area in 35 years.
The hotel will add 151 rooms to the downtown area, on top of the 430 rooms ready for occupation that ABC-7 reported in 2017.
“This hotel is a great example of what the future of El paso deserves to be. Special for El paso, designed for El Paso, and bringing visitors to our town that we can be proud of,” said Jim Scherr, the owner of the Marriott Courtyard.
The Marriott Courtyard is just one of the hotels expected to increase hotel capacity in Downtown El Paso, something the Hotel-Motel Association says is important to bring larger conventions to the Sun City.
Millions of dollars are also being spent in Downtown El Paso to renovate old buildings and construct new ones, all in an effort to draw more business to the area.
“Whether they’re hotels, in terms of visitors, or you got residential components coming in like Artspace and other privately owned properties, that is a pretty good number of bodies coming into downtown and that’s going to be great for the economic impact,” said Rudy Vasquez, with the Downtown Management District.
Conventions downtown help bring in people from around the country to spend their money here, potentially bring millions of new dollars into the Borderland, but none of that can happen if these visitors don’t have a place to stay.
“A lot of those larger conventions that they try to go after require more room nights downtown, more rooms available downtown, and we haven’t been able to provide that. I think by having this it will position us better,” Gabriel Ayud, Hotel-Motel Association vice president, told ABC-7 in 2017.
Tourism organizations say it’s not just the number of rooms that matters, but the distance from convention space.
“What’s been lacking is a quality convention room inventory in close proximity, so this brings us up to a more level playing field. I have the meeting space and now I have the hotel inventory to match and complement,” said Brooke Underwood, with Destination El Paso, in an interview last year.
Once the Marriott Courtyard opens along with other hotels under renovation, like the former Camino Real, room space could nearly triple.
“Once all the new construction is done and the renovation of the Camino currently, but once it reopens as the Paso del Norte that brings our inventory in the downtown area to around 1200 rooms,” Underwood said in 2017.
