Omni to Build $250M Convention Center Headquarters Hotel in Downtown Nashville

August 30, 2010
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Construction is already underway on Nashville’s 1.2 million-square-foot Music City Convention Center (pictured), and now that Omni Hotels & Resorts has entered into a pre-development agreement with the City of Nashville, plans are in place for an 800-room convention center headquarters lodging facility. The $250 million Omni Nashville Hotel will debut soon after the convention center opens its doors in 2013.

What is now a downtown parking lot will become home to the Omni Nashville, which will also count the renowned Country Music Hall of Fame as its neighbor. The headquarters hotel’s offerings will include 80,000 square feet of meeting space, as well as retail space, several restaurants, a fitness facility and a spa. Additionally, Omni Nashville will be designed to mesh with the celebrated cultural characteristics of the town known as Music City.

Nashville’s hotel market did not dodge the debilitating blow of the economic crisis, but numbers indicate that it is, indeed, on the mend. The market’s average occupancy level is on track to increase to 59.5 percent over the next four quarters, compared to 57.3 percent over the previous four quarters, according to a forecast by Colliers PKF Hospitality Research. ADR, RevPAR, and demand are also expected to increase over the next year.

Despite the improving picture for Nashville’s hotel market, the public-private partnership behind the Omni Nashville is not exactly placing all its faith in the city’s latest occupancy and RevPAR figures and the like. Omni Hotels and city officials anticipate that the new 18-acre convention center will entice a substantial number of meeting planners to choose Nashville for gatherings.

“Essentially, when it comes to associations or large organizations looking for a destination, there are three important factors that are taken into consideration,” Caryn Kboudi, Vice President of Corporate Communications for Omni Hotels, told CPE. “It has to be a great location that has an interesting draw–the Country Music Hall of Fame, downtown Nashville’s top tourist destination, is adjacent to the convention center–it has to be easy to get to and the convention center and hotel have to be first-class facilities. Nashville is easy to get to, it has great weather, it has wonderful people and downtown has everything you’d want to do in Nashville. It has the perfect ingredients for a destination for meeting planners to pick for a convention.”