Aggie conference center, hotel set to open in August
Public-private project on A&M campus designed to meet high demand for space as football fans, professional guests visit
COLLEGE Station’s growing hospitality market will get a major boost when Texas A&M University’s on-campus hotel opens in August.
The Doug Pitcock ’49 Hotel and Conference Center, nearing completion across the street from Kyle Field and adjacent to the Memorial Student Center, is a public-private project designed to provide not just Saturday-night lodging for football fans but also a centralized meeting site for conventions, job recruiters, visiting speakers and more.
The new hotel will have 250 rooms, a fitness center, a third-deck pool and a restaurant with a bar. The site also includes a 1,400-car garage and 35,000 square feet of event space. Advertised room rates start in the low-$100s, but on some weekends a nightly stay will cost more than $700.
Meetings with professional guests, including campus speakers and recruiters from Fortune 500 companies, have typically been confined to smaller conference rooms and other spaces spread across campus, Chancellor John Sharp said.
“The need for a conference center on campus has been here since before I got here,” he said.
Randy McCaslin, founder
and CEO of McCaslin Hotel Consulting in Houston, said demand for lodging on or near campus also has been high for years. That pressure only grew after A&M joined the Southeastern Conference, whose outof-state fans are known for traveling to support their teams, he said.
Sharp decided that building a hotel with paid public parking spaces would be a good way to pay for a conference center.
The location of the combined hotel and conference center should attract football fans beginning this fall, as guests can simply cross Joe Routt Boulevard from their hotel to attend a game. It also offers a centralized spot for a number of activities that can be held in the meeting rooms and ballroom.
The project is being managed by The Woodlands-based Benchmark Hospitality International. The company will be paid based on the hotel’s performance. Net income from the hotel and parking garage will go to the university.
Benchmark CEO and A&M alum Alex Cabañas said the firm has experience with managing college-campus hotels. He said the new Aggie property achieves a decades-long goal.
When applying to work on the A&M hotel and conference center project, he recalled, Cabañas came across a 1987 letter from his father, Benchmark’s founder, expressing interest in running a hotel in the Bryan College Station market.
Interest in the region has exploded in the years since.
A Texas tourism report published last year found that there were 50 hotels in the twin cities in 2014, 55 in 2015, and 58 in 2016. More recent high-profile additions include the luxury-branded Cavalry Court and The George hotels near campus and The Stella in Bryan, a short drive from Easterwood Airport.
Room bookings across the region between January and April were up 16 percent over the same period in 2017, said Ken Dobbie, director of marketing and communications for Experience Bryan College Station.
An increasing number of national and international conferences, association meetings and athletic championships have been held in the region, and hotels and restaurants are trying to meet demand from the growing crowds, Dobbie added.
“It’s becoming a destination place,” Dobbie said.
Cabañas noted that groups are looking for experiential destinations, and the A&M campus itself offers a lot for everyone from sports fans, to art lovers, to those curious to learn from expert speakers.
Cabañas expects over the course of a year that guests will more likely be association leaders, visiting researchers and others with an academic interest. But the hotel will offer premier packages for well-heeled Aggie football fans. For example, a hefty tax-deductible donation to the university can secure a guest room for 10 seasons of home games.
In addition, Benchmark intends to staff more than half of the hotel jobs with A&M students and alumni. They will work the front desk, carry luggage for guests and, with a mixed-beverage permit application pending, tend bar inside the hotel and conference center.
“We’re not the living room of the campus,” Cabañas said, “but we are the guest room.”