The Hyatt Regency New Orleans, whose blown-out windows became some of the first images of Hurricane Katrina damage broadcast to television audiences around the country in 2005, will reopen to guests Oct. 19.
The Hyatt’s more than 1,000 guest rooms will help propel the city’s tourism industry closer to pre-Katrina levels of hotel capacity.
Assuming there is a football season, the Hyatt will open just in time for the New Orleans Saints’ Oct. 23 rematch against the Indianapolis Colts.
“We’re going to open with a bang,” the hotel’s general manager Michael Smith said. “We closed with a bang, we’re going to open with one. We’re the phoenix rising from the ashes.”
Smith said the opening date will also kick off a more than yearlong period of special events in the city, including the 2012 BCS championship game, the 2012 Final Four and the 2013 Super Bowl, all of which will attract business to the hotel, he said.
The 1,193-room hotel will include 95 suites. It will also contain two restaurants, one with an as-yet-to-be-named “celebrity chef”; a 24-hour fresh market; and a Starbucks coffee shop. The revolving rooftop restaurant is being replaced with a club-level lounge that overlooks the city and a fitness center that overlooks the Superdome and the New Orleans Arena. The lounge and fitness center will not revolve.
Smith is careful not to call the Hyatt’s repairs a renovation. He said he prefers the term “redevelopment and repositioning” and said the redeveloped Hyatt will have some marked differences from the old one. For starters, the hotel has doubled its meeting space to 200,000 square feet.
The reopening of the Hyatt will put the local tourism industry closer to pre-Katrina levels of hotel capacity. The Hyatt’s reopening will bring the total number of hotel rooms in New Orleans to 36,387 rooms, about 92 percent of the city’s pre-Katrina total. (Before the storm, there were 39,525 hotel rooms in New Orleans.)
The addition of the Hyatt will also boost the number of hotel rooms within one mile of the Convention Center to 23,000, according to the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association.