Hotel developers maintain keen focus on Bentonville
by September 19, 2018 12:29 pm 2,334 views
Avid Hotel Oklahoma City-Quail Springs in Oklahoma. Similar developments are being planned in Northwest Arkansas.
A large-scale development plan has been submitted with Bentonville planners for yet another hotel in the city.
The planning commission will consider at its Oct. 2 meeting a plan to build a 95-room hotel called Avid, the 13th and newest brand under the InterContinental Hotels Group, (NYSE: IHG) umbrella. IHG, headquartered domestically in Georgia, is reportedly planning to open 130 Avid hotels over the next three to five years in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The first, with 87 rooms, opened in August in Oklahoma City.
An IHG spokesperson said the Bentonville hotel will be independently owned and operated and is estimated to open by the end of 2019. The proposed site is a 1.6-acre site at 2303 Medlin Lane, just off Walton Boulevard. It’s directly behind two other hotels — Holiday Inn Express & Suites and Super 8 by Wyndham. The hotel will be built across Medlin Lane from another hotel that’s wrapping up construction — the 107-room Element Hotel by Westin, which will be the city’s 24th hotel.
Besides Avid, two other Bentonville hotels have been announced in the past three months. In June, a development group that involves Tom Walton announced its intention to develop a 0.6-acre site at the southeast corner of the downtown square into a full-service hotel that will have between 100 and 200 rooms.
The hotel will be built on the Tucker’s Corner site at 200 E. Central Ave., a building now home to multiple tenants, including the Greater Bentonville Area Chamber of Commerce. The project is still in the design phase and is expected to break ground in 2019.
Hotel management and development company Krushiker Hospitality Group Inc. of Springdale has received approval for its large-scale development plan to build a 119-room hotel just off northbound Interstate 49. The 2.6-acre site is on Southeast Griffin Drive near NorthWest Arkansas Community College.
According to the city’s tourism bureau, Bentonville’s existing 23 hotels have a combined 2,003 rooms, an average of 87 rooms per hotel.
IHG is also planning to build an 82-room Avid hotel in Fayetteville on Salem Road, just off Wedington Drive behind Planet Fitness. That hotel is projected to open in the first quarter of 2020.