Hyatt Riverwalk set for $19.8M makeover
With four new entrants to downtown’s hotel scene scheduled to be open by the end of the year, the Hyatt Regency San Antonio Riverwalk is set for a $19.8 million makeover.
Plans call for renovating 629 guest rooms — including new flooring, paint, vanities, showers and tubs — according to a filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.
Construction at the hotel at 123 Losoya St. is expected to start in November and conclude in April, the filing shows. A Hyatt Hotels Corp. spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry Monday.
The Hyatt’s renovation will join several other hotel projects in the works nearby. While downtown had not seen a new hotel since 2018, four are either open or scheduled to be welcoming guests by the end of this year.
The new Canopy by Hilton San Antonio Riverwalk and Thompson San Antonio-riverwalk are already open. The Riverview Towers office building at 111 Soledad St. is being converted to an AC Hotel by Marriott and an Element Hotel by Westin, which are slated to open later this year.
Last month, the Historic and Design Review Commission gave conceptual approval to designs for an 11-room “spa hotel,” multiple restaurants and a rooftop bar at 112 Soledad St., next to the shuttered Mexican Manhattan restaurant.
And a group of investors recently bought the Wyndham San Antonio River Walk hotel and plan to plug $50 million into turning it into a luxury Intercontinental Hotel, which is anticipated to open in early 2023.
The coronavirus pandemic
decimated tourism, the city’s third-largest industry, and downtown was hit particularly hard. Beyond the activity by hotel companies and investors, other signs suggest tourism in San Antonio is beginning to recover.
The number of leisure visitors has been rising since spring break in March and peaked in July. Overall hotel occupancy in July averaged 74 percent, the best month for hotels since the start of the pandemic and just shy of 76.6 percent overall occupancy in July 2019 before COVID-19, according to global hospitality data
and analytics company STR.
In the city’s central business district specifically, occupancy
in July averaged 68.3 percent. That was down from 79.5 percent during the same month in 2019.
Leisure tourism is slowing as usual this late summer as families wrap up their vacations and children return to school. And as the pandemic continues to rage, conventions and meetings have not returned en masse as is typical at this time of year.
Visitor levels year-round are not expected to return to prepandemic levels until 2024, Visit San Antonio president and CEO Marc Anderson recently told the City Council. He said he hopes San Antonio will be host to 43 citywide convention events by 2024.