What will a new hotel mean for Downtown Spartanburg?

If you've been wrapped up in the winter weather madness gripping Spartanburg this week, you might've missed one of the most important downtown development stories to come along in recent memory as City Council voted unanimously on Monday to approve an incentive agreement for a new upscale hotel development at the corner of West Main Street and Daniel Morgan Avenue. Local businessman George Dean Johnson Jr. and his Spartanburg-based hotel development company, OTO Development, plan to build a hotel that will include at least 100 rooms and represent at least an $20 million investment on the western edge of downtown. The announcment comes at a time when demand for lodging downtown is increasingly exceeding suppply, owing to Spartanburg’s seven downtown corporate headquarters, its seven institutions of higher learning, and the successful efforts of the Spartanburg Convention & Visitors Bureau to increasingly recruit conventions, conferences and sports tournaments. All that action means visitors to Spartanburg have increasingly been forced to find rooms elsewhere with only the 250-room Spartanburg Marriott located downtown. OTO officials predict their hotel will bring at least 30,000 annual guests to the heart of downtown, and the annual economic impact of the hotel is expected to reach into the millions. To put it mildly, the potential impact this project could have on our city's downtown is immense, and today on the podcast, we're talking about some of the possibilities.