SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — San Diego businessman and developer Doug Manchester is unveiling details about a new Embarcadero mega-hotel he's proposing for the Navy-owned site facing the waterfront at the corner of Pacific Highway and Broadway.
“In the real estate business we call it Main and Main. In other words, this is the ultimate from a standpoint of a location," Manchester said Wednesday in an interview with ABC 10News.
The plan calls for a 36-story, 1,150-room hotel, which will also features several dining options, a pool deck, and meeting space. Manchester said the project fits a need for San Diego's downtown area.
“We just think that San Diego offers so much to conventioneers and it’ll continue to do so and we really need more hotel rooms and we intend to provide that," he told ABC 10News.
Carl Winston, director of San Diego State University's School of Hospitality and Tourism, said the San Diego region has almost fully rebounded from the pandemic. Business travel, which has lagged in its recovery, is bouncing back much faster in San Diego than city's competing to host conventions and meetings.
“It puts San Diego in a very enviable position of actually adding a couple of new, large hotels to accommodate what is some pretty pent up demand for conventions and large groups coming to San Diego," Winston said, also referencing the new 1,600-room Gaylord Pacific Hotel and Convention Center being built in Chula Vista.
Winston said adding that number of rooms will bring tens of thousands of additional tourists to San Diego each year, generating additional money through hotel taxes.
"That money goes straight to San Diego’s coffers for, like I said, police, potholes and everything else that we do, we spend money on for taxes. It’s going to benefit a lot of San Diegans in a very big way," said Winston.
According to Manchester, his team has been working on the project since 2006, when he reached a deal to build the Navy a new office complex on the property.
Manchester later sold the rights to develop most of the rest of the land, on which a large life sciences campus is under construction. However, Manchester maintained control of the portion of the property which would host the hotel.
He said his company just submitted its plans to the city and hopes to have them approved by the end of the year. He plans to close a deal and name a hotel management partner in January, with construction slated to begin by the end of 2023. The timeline would see a grand opening by the end of 2025.
“It all takes time, but in the end, we’re proud of what we’ve done and will continue to be proud in the future," Manchester said. "Once we get going, it’ll go up fast.”
