Downtown Miami is well served by high end hotels like the Four Seasons, the Conrad and the JW Marriott. What the downtown area currently lacks are medium-tier urban-concept hotels which can provide the amenities business travelers need without the high prices of a five-star hotel.
Enter two new exciting projects to fill the void for business travelers to the area: Aloft Miami-Brickell & The Langford Hotel
Mary Brickell Village Hotel LLC and its principal Pedro Villar, which has recently secured $7.5 million in construction financing to convert a previously built condominium building into Aloft Miami-Brickell. Villar told the Daily Business Review that Aloft has a “very chic, urban style. I think the area is in need of that type of hotel.”
With an estimated average room rate of $120-140 a night, Aloft is designed as a moderately priced alternative to the high dollar five-star hotels and the low-end places that don’t quite cut it for business travelers. Aloft, which is a Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. brand, hopes to appeal to young travelers with urban-inspired design features such as 9-foot ceilings, oversized windows, contemporary furnishings, large walk-in showers and 42-inch plasma televisions linked to a plug-and-play electronics center.
Stambul USA, a Miami developer, is also repositioning the 87-year-old Miami National Bank building in downtown Miami into The Langford Hotel, a 130 room luxury boutique hotel that will target mid-priced business travelers. “The market we’re attacking now hasn’t been covered by hotels in the area,” Stambul GM and director Daniel Pena-Giraldi told the Daily Business Review. Pena-Giraldi continued, “You either have high-end five-star or low-end hotels that charge $80 a night. We’re smack in the middle.”
These two new projects are a good start to providing some much-needed middle ground between Miami’s high and low end hotel markets.