A weekly update on the business of the Braves:
Hotel deal: The Braves' 50-50 partnership with Omni Hotels & Resorts on a luxury hotel overlooking SunTrust Park, announced this week, mirrors a deal the Dallas Cowboys struck last year.
The Cowboys and Omni are partnering to build a 300-room hotel at the team’s new practice facility, corporate headquarters and mixed-use development under construction in Frisco, Texas. That hotel is slated to open in 2017, the same year as the Braves’ 260-room hotel.
Omni also has a hotel that is connected to the San Diego Padres’ Petco Park by a pedestrian skybridge, although that hotel isn’t a joint venture with the team.
Omni Hotels president Mike Deitemeyer expects exterior construction on the SunTrust Park hotel to be completed when the Cobb County stadium opens in April 2017. But he doesn’t expect the interior to be ready for guests until fall of that year — around World Series time.
Getting there: As the Braves continue to roll out SunTrust Park announcements, the team still has revealed few details about how transportation and parking concerns will be addressed.
“There’s no question that transportation is a big issue with us. We are working hard to solve it, as is Cobb County and the DOT,” Braves chairman and CEO Terry McGuirk said this week.
“We’re two years away from opening the park, so we’ve got time. We’re working on the parking issue every day. … We’re very sure that the day we open up this ballpark, we will have parking taken care of.”
McGuirk said the shops and restaurants in the adjacent mixed-use complex will change traffic patterns for games: “People are going to spread out their arrival and departure times dramatically differently than the way they’re using the ballpark today.”
Quotable: After the news conference on the Omni deal, someone asked McGuirk what he will do if Freddie Freeman breaks hotel windows with long home runs to right-center field.
“Give him a bonus,” McGuirk said.
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