TULSA -- Five new hotels are under construction in Downtown Tulsa right now.
Ray Hoyt, President of Tulsa Regional Tourism, a program of the Tulsa Regional Chamber, said the construction all over downtown is indicative of the growth in the area. He said the hotels are catching up to the demand.
"Tulsa is becoming the destination it always had the potential to be," Hoyt said.
The new hotels are popping up all over downtown.
Hotel Indigo is located at Second and South Detroit Avenue. A Holiday Inn Express is going in at Archer and Detroit. The Tulsa Club is going up on Fifth and Cincinnati. A Hyatt is being built on Fourth and Main Street. Another hotel is under construction on Fifth and Denver.
Together, they will provide Tulsa with about 500 new hotel rooms in downtown. It will add to the 1,700 existing rooms in the area.
"Out of that 1,700, there are only probably about 800 that we can get to," Hoyt said. "The rest of them have corporate contracts, airline contracts, you name it."
When concerts or festivals come to town, those hotels are sold out.
Most of the new hotels are new construction. The Tulsa Club, on the other hand, is bringing an existing downtown building back to life that sat vacant for years.
"We are looking to bring that historic feel back when guests stay as well as adding a lot of modern touches," Pete Patel, President and CEO of Promise Hotels, said.
Patel said there are so many variations of rooms in the Tulsa Club Hotel that guests will never stay in the same type twice.
"I think that's an opportunity where we are not bulldozing our history, but we are reinventing itt. Those buildings have great bones and architecture that you probably couldn't afford today," Hoyt said.
The Cox Convention Center is on the books for a remodel in 2018. Hoyt said it will add 40,000 square feet of conference space.
Hoyt believes the next hotel that moves into downtown needs to cater to the large conferences. It is something the city wants to start bringing into town.
"It's a disadvantage to us competitively with places like Oklahoma City building a new convention center with a brand new Omni connected to it," Hoyt said. "Nashville and Austin, basically all of them doing that. We are limited to some of the convention sizes that we can host."
The new hotels will start opening in 2018.
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