The Atlanta Braves got into the hotel business Tuesday, announcing a 50-50 partnership with Omni Hotels & Resorts on a luxury hotel to be built overlooking the team’s new stadium in Cobb County.
The full-service hotel — the latest addition to the mixed-use complex the Braves plan to build around SunTrust Park — will have about 260 rooms on 16 floors and about 12,500 square feet of meeting space, Omni officials said. It also will feature a two-story restaurant, rooftop hospitality suites and an elevated pool deck with views into the ballpark, the officials said.
Neither the Braves nor Omni would disclose the cost to build the hotel, which Omni will manage.
“We’re putting hard dollars into this project (as) 50-50 owners with the Braves,” said Bob Rowling, chairman and chief executive of TRT Holdings, the parent company of Omni Hotels & Resorts. “We’re excited about putting our money down and making some money here.”
The stadium project has expanded the business of the Braves from running a baseball team into the high-stakes world of hotel, office, retail and residential development for the mixed-use complex.
“These are opportunities — not only opportunities to be in good ventures, but to do it right,” Braves chairman and CEO Terry McGuirk said in an interview after a news conference announcing the Omni deal. “We are absolutely committed to trying to do best in class. We’re so particular as to who our partners are, how this area gets populated.
“It all contributes to the ballpark. We want this to be the finest place for our fans to come.”
The Braves’ announcement brought a half dozen of Dallas-based Omni’s top executives to the news conference, held in an office building across the street from the ballpark construction site.
“I hadn’t been here before, but you can’t help but … get pretty excited when you look out the window and see what is going on,” Rowling said. “This entire development just honestly blows me away.”
Omni Hotels president Mike Deitemeyer said he expects exterior construction on the stadium hotel to be completed by the time the Braves play their first game in Cobb in 2017. Interior work will continue beyond that point, and the hotel likely won’t be ready for guests until fall of that year, Deitemeyer said.
Omni operates 60 hotels in North America, including the Omni Atlanta Hotel at CNN Center.
The company sees the market for its new SunTrust Park hotel — The Omni Atlanta Northwest Hotel — as a combination of “mid-week corporate” and “weekend leisure” guests, Deitemeyer said.
“We think it’ll be a location that garners a premium (room rate compared to) the general area,” he said. “We also believe with Comcast (planning to move 1,000 workers into an office building in the Braves’ complex), there will be new demand created here not just on the leisure side but also Monday through Thursday.”
Hotel industry expert Paul Breslin, managing director of hospitality consulting company Howrath HTL, said Omni will have to work hard to pull in corporate business to make the numbers work.
“It will be a challenge, no question,” Breslin said. “If the hotel is to be successful, it needs to be a mixed-use facility with corporate as well as leisure demand.”
McGuirk left open the possibility of the Braves developing a second hotel “at a lower service level” in its stadium complex.
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