67-year-old airport hotel remains ‘the only show in town’

Miami-Dade just OK’d a contract to keep Miami International Airport’s demeaned 259-room hotel open five to 10 more years. Though the county touts a first-class airport, it’s tough to be best while dragged down by a last-choice hotel that in 10 years would be 77 years old.

For decades we’ve reported complaints about the monopoly hotel inside the airport. But the county is stuck with operating an inadequate hotel because it has no choice.

“The plan is to keep this hotel because it’s the only show in town that we have right now,” Aviation Director Ralph Cutié admitted to commissioners last month as they approved by an 11-1 vote a five-year operating contract with a five-year renewal option.

The holdout voter was Juan Carlos Bermudez, who made crystal clear his displeasure with the hotel under any operator at an airport that is the county’s uncontested economic engine.

“To be competitive as an airport we need to have the best possible across the board,” Mr. Bermudez said, adding that people who stay in the airport’s hotel complain. “I know nobody wants to talk about this, but I’m going to start talking about it because I’m having a lot of concerns.”

“The first thing everybody sees is our airport when they fly in to us, even when they’re going on a cruise,” Mr. Bermudez said, referring to 55.3 million air passengers last year. “Many of our visitors, the first thing many of our residents see, and I’ve told you before that a lot of them have concerns.”

He’s the latest in a series of commissioners and aviation directors who have criticized the airport’s own hotel over the years.

As long ago as 2003, officials were trying to upgrade the hotel under better management, and while 17 firms that year expressed interest in operating the hotel, none accepted an offer to actually do so. Even when later solicitations brought candidates, they weren’t national brands.

“I am concerned that only three firms responded to this solicitation, only two of which were responsive,” Aviation Director Emilio Gonzalez wrote in 2013 to a hotel operator selection team. “Given the location and occupancy rates of the MIA hotel, I am deeply troubled that competition for this award is not more robust. Additionally, no national firms proposed. These facts suggest to me that our current process is flawed.”

One of the three 2013 contenders, Driftwood Hospitality Management of North Palm Beach, was one of three firms vying for the contract again last month and again was chosen. No big names were on the list; for some reason, they never are.

Recognizing the inadequacy of what is branded the Miami International Airport Hotel, elected officials have long sought a new hotel on airport land.

Plans for an Airport City with its own meeting hotel were launched in 2008 but crashed and burned as commissioners criticized the Brazilian developer’s subsidiary operations in Cuba.

In 2012 other companies expressed interest in developing a hotel there. Four years ago, commissioners agreed with a high-flying partnership, Fontainebleau hotel owner Jeffrey Soffer and Steve Ross, the Miami Dolphins’ principal owner, to build a 451-room airport hotel that has problems and hasn’t gotten out of the ground.

That, as Mr. Cutié said, leaves the aged hotel as the only game in town.

Commissioner Keon Hardemon, during a 2023 committee meeting on building a new hotel, said “I have had an opportunity to be a customer of our airport hotel and it’s not the best experience, to put it lightly. I know that we can do better in Miami-Dade County.”

In March, Mr. Hardemon again rated the airport hotel. “The current hotel that we’ve been discussing, if you’ve never been inside of it, it leaves much to be desired,” he said. “It’s a place to lay your head.” What could be more damning in a global magnet city – a place to lay your head.

Yet a place to lay your head may be the best Miami can offer in years to come. The Soffer-Ross project remains within the window to meet its county’s agreement, Mr. Cutié said in March, but the developers can’t make their design work, haven’t submitted a new one, and because of the delays must now run the gauntlet of the county commission for approval of any new design.

That puts a long-sought new hotel in question and means that the old hotel must live on and on as the best we can offer – hence, the new agreement for five years with a possible five-year extension.

“What I don’t want to do is cut off our nose to spite our face” by closing the old hotel, which in 2024 got a facelift, Mr. Cutié said. “For now, it gives us good flexibility that we have both, and then once the new hotel is up and running that we have both and then at some time, depending on what the numbers yield, then we will make that decision.”

So after putting lipstick on a pig with a facelift, a place to lay your head is the best that you can get at Miami International Airport. As Mr. Bermudez correctly emphasized, “to be competitive as an airport we also need to have the best.” We won’t.