Marriott Marquis Miami On Target For July 2010 Opening

By Scott E. Pacheco
Two new downtown Miami hotels are getting their management in order as they look forward to July 2010 openings.

Florencia Tabeni has taken over as general manager of the Hotel Beaux Arts Miami and the JW Marriott Marquis Miami, both under construction in the Metropolitan 2 building. Ms. Tabeni moves over from the JW Marriott, 1109 Brickell Ave., where she has been replaced by Florencia Rotemberg.

The two women are to lead hotels positioned to fill niches in the Brickell/downtown area.

Hotel Beaux Arts is a 44-room boutique, featuring 11 suites, marketed as a "high-end" product for customers looking for a "private hotel environment," said Paul Pebley, director of sales and marketing for the Hotel Beaux Arts and JW Marriott Marquis, both at 345 Avenue of the Americas.

The Marquis is the first of its kind in the Marriott family of hotels. It is to feature 313 guestrooms and 80,000 square feet of meeting space, including a 20,000-square-foot ballroom, Mr. Pebley said.

"We’re on schedule for opening next July," he said. "Pretty much guestroom floors have all been dry-walled in. All of the framing is completed for all of the interior spaces and we are finishing off the front entrance and installing the last of the exterior glass."

Despite new hotel inventory in Greater Miami, including other new higher-end hotel offerings in the Viceroy, 485 Brickell Ave., and the Epic, at 270 Biscayne Blvd Way across the street from Met 2, Mr. Pebley said both properties should be well-positioned for business when they open.

"With the Hotel Beaux Arts — that becomes pretty manageable even in an inventory surplus situation," he said. "You are really looking at a very, very niche audience that has" money and is still traveling.

He said while there are multiple hotels in Brickell and downtown, most have limited meeting space compared to what the Marquis is to boast. Of the other hotels, he said, "they’re really much more exclusively transient hotels with limited meeting space."

Mr. Pebley said both properties were developed to find and fill what the downtown inventory lacks.

The "really unique amenity package" the Marquis is to offer, he said, will include a National Basketball Association-approved basketball court, a bowling alley and a media room, among extras that are "features that would attract meetings as well as the leisure traveler."

Currently, the Marquis is focusing on booking meetings.

"Right now the focus is to lock down meetings for kind of mid- and long-term period and then as we get after the first of the year — only then will we start to look at medium-sized meetings that would be on the fall of next year," Mr. Pebley said.

As far as the Marquis competing with the JW Marriott Hotel Miami, Marriott International’s "2008 Hotel of the Year," Mr. Pebley said they are geographically and strategically well-positioned to co-exist.

"The meeting space is significantly different," he said. "If it’s the pure business traveler, they are far enough part. There’s an infrastructure of corporate business that fits into both of those locations." Advertisement