The Tulsa Arts District is getting another hotel, this one across the street from ONEOK Field.
The $16 million, five-story Holiday Inn Express is being built by the Ross Group and Promise Hotels, which built the Hampton Inn across from the BOK Center. There is a Fairfield Inn on Main Street in the Tulsa Arts District.
Promise Hotels CEO Pete Patel said the 115 room Holiday Inn Express is immediately north of the train tracks at Archer and Detroit.
"There's plans for a parking garage back here, which will serve the hotel as well as block 44 that's going to be built across the street from us," Patel said. "And train noise will be blocked by the parking garage."
Promise Hotels also has plans for a Hilton Garden Inn downtown near its Hampton Inn Hotel. Visit Tulsa President Ray Hoyt said he hopes the increase in downtown hotel offerings attracts more out-of-state visitors, since their stays in Tulsa pump money into the city general fund.
"So, the higher we raise that number, the more we get that imported tax and that visitor and that destination market here, it'll support our community, make it more vibrant," Hoyt said.
Mayor G.T. Bynum said Tulsa is in a third major wave of development that will physically shape the city, the first two bringing Art Deco in the 1920s and the airport and BOK Tower in the 1960s and 1970s.
"With everything that is happening in downtown — and especially today in the arts district — it's just very exciting to see this kind of investment happening in our city and the physical transformation of a really important part of our city," Bynum said.
The Holiday Inn Express should open in early 2019.
