clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Neighborhood key for Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport, city’s largest new inn since 1984

The 1,054-room hotel is counting on attracting not only business travelers via the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center across the street, but locals and tourists too

Rendering of a large, block-long hotel meeting the busy sidewalk. Elkus Manfredi Architects/Omni

The largest Boston hotel since the 1,144-room Boston Marriott Copley Place opened in 1984 is aiming to be a destination not only for business travelers using the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center across the street but for locals or tourists.

“What I think is happening with the opening of this hotel is that D Street and Summer Street will become Main and Main,” said Mike Jorgensen, the recently minted managing director of the under-construction Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport at 450 Summer Street.

The 21-story, 1,054-room hotel with 52 suites is due to open in June 2021. It will be Boston’s fourth-largest hotel, and will include a run of attractions and amenities that its parent hopes capitalizes on a burgeoning surrounding neighborhood, a general boom in the Boston-area hospitality industry, and the possible expansion of that convention center—which the $550 million Omni Boston will be connected to via an underground pedestrian tunnel.

Jorgensen pointed to what he called “demand generators” in the Seaport that he said will drive local interest in the hotel and its amenities.

These include the state-controlled convention center—which the administration of Gov. Charlie Baker has proposed expanding by tens of thousands of square feet at the expense of shuttering and selling Back Bay’s Hynes Convention Center—and the 17-story office building that Amazon’s developing at 111 Harbor Way, which the e-commerce behemoth plans to fill with 2,000 employees. That tower is expected to open in 2021.

Then there are the numerous residential projects that have sprouted in the Seaport in recent years. And the convention center expansion plan would include the transfer of 12 adjacent acres to the City of Boston, likely for redevelopment down the road.

As for the Omni Boston’s amenities, those are due to include multiple restaurants and bars as well as an elevated lounge in the lobby for performances from local artists; and 100,000 square feet of event and meeting space. The Omni Boston will also have the city’s largest ballroom at 26,000 square feet, with a second 16,000-square-foot one too.

And it will be opening in one of the more robust local hospitality markets in recent memory. A January report from CBRE Hotels forecasted that both the Boston region’s average daily room rate and the revenue per available room—the two big metrics for hotel operators—are expected to increase through 2020.

Also, occupancy in the region’s hotel market is forecasted to remain above 65.5 percent through 2021, the year the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport opens—well above the industry’s long-run benchmark and meaning that on any given night nearly two-thirds of the area’s rooms will be full.

The occupancy rate is even higher in Boston and Cambridge specifically—at least 80 percent for several years running now, according to consultancy Pinnacle Advisory Group.

Editor’s note: This article originally incorrectly stated that the Omni Boston was the largest new Boston hotel since 2006. In fact, it’s the largest since 1984, according to Pinnacle.