Demand for hotel space grows as Downtown develops

By Cameron Montemayor

As the banners and billboards come down one by one across St. Joseph following the Women’s Division II National Championship, local leaders are stressing the importance of addressing a growing need for hotel space.

By 2026, a new $22 million Marriott by Courtyard Hotel is expected to sit across from the Civic Arena with 125 new rooms to accommodate visitors. The initial vision was to have the hotel constructed for this year’s tournament and the 1,000-plus hotel nights needed to accommodate all the athletes, families and school officials over the week.

It was revealed earlier this year that rising interest rates and construction costs had forced Marriott developer HDDA’s primary lender to back out due to market concerns, leaving HDDA with an $8 million financing gap it struggled to fill in time. The developer was forced to rework an agreement with the city for a new construction timeline.

But there is a need for hotel rooms now, officials said.

“We’ve got the highest ADR in the state right now, average daily rate. And so that just goes back to the demand,” said Christian Mengel, director of marketing and communications with the St. Joseph Convention and Visitors Bureau. “And that’s basically where we’re at now. We don’t have enough hotel rooms for, you know, what our real demand is.”

The city has received revised plans for the proposed Downtown hotel but has not issued a permit or confirmed a start date for construction.

The delay in hotel construction is an unfortunate turn in what’s otherwise been a long line of positive development for events and business activity in St. Joseph and Downtown over the last decade.

Looking at the glass half full, Mengel said the need for more hotels is a sign of Downtown growth and community development that necessitates boosting hotel infrastructure.

“Downtown is continuing to need a hotel more every day because of the activity that’s going on, because of the business that’s coming in, because of new start-ups, because of more events in the Civic Arena,” Mengel said. “It’s all good, positive energy moving for Downtown that calls for a hotel.”

The need for rooms is so great that Mengel has heard from other hotel officials about a desire to see additional spaces for visitors in situations when they are booked up for events.

“That’s them thinking from a competitive standpoint because eventually, they don’t like to get to the point of having to turn business away and turn people down,” Mengel said.

As big as the need for additional rooms is, St. Joseph is a virtual desert for large hotel conference rooms.

“That’s crucial, critical when we’re looking at hotels for team travel,” said Brett Esely, executive director of the St. Joseph Sports Commission. “Stoney Creek’s really right now the only true conference center hotel property that we have.”

When the bid for the Women’s Division II National Championship was put in five years ago, the hotel landscape looked much different than what it does today as the Downtown Red Lion Hotel was still operational across from the Civic Arena.

More than 170 athletes, coaches and their families attended the 2024 tournament, a signature and successful event for the city and St. Joseph Sports Commission. Limited hotel space presented challenges accommodating preferred NCAA team travel arrangements, which have become more strict in recent years.

“So with that, it was not, I think, the goal or expectation to put five teams in one hotel property. At most. I think the NCAA probably likes to put three in one property. Fortunately enough, Stoney Creek was able to handle that,” Esely said. “And so that’s why future development, especially for a Downtown property, is just critical from the space standpoint.”

The commission is pushing to bring the tournament back in 2027 and 2028 and hopes to be able to boast a new hotel to go along with it.

The Downtown hotel is expected to have an additional 8,000 square feet of meeting space and smaller breakout rooms. New meeting areas would go a long way to accommodating teams and luring more business, sporting events and conventions, officials said.

“So if we can get more hotels with conference room space, that really opens up to a lot of options in terms of what we can host and what we can bring in,” Mengel said.

Beyond the benefit for visitors and tourism, a stronger balance of hotel options throughout the city would have an impact on the health of business activity when travelers flock to St. Joseph.

With no commercial hotels west of the Belt Highway, unfamiliar visitors staying for multi-day events tend to do business at national franchises and stores located near where they are staying, away from the small business scene that’s made strides in the last 10 years.

“Downtown is our most local district in terms of businesses locally owned, it’s the owners that are behind the counters and they’re sometimes hurting for business when everyone’s on the east end of town,” Mengel said.

Downtown or anywhere, Mengel and Esely both agree: The need for more hotel space is growing.

The planned construction of two new hotels — a My Place and a Hilton hotel near the Shoppes at North Village — is evidence of that. The My Place Hotel could have anywhere from 80 to 120 rooms.

“We have roughly just over 800 hotel rooms in St. Joseph, Missouri. If you want to compare that to a city, let’s use Joplin,” Esely said. “Population-wise, we have about 25,000 more people than Joplin. Joplin has about 3,600 hotel rooms. So those two hotel profiles don’t compare.”