This city will be home to the West Coast's largest hotel if the Marriott Convention Hotel at Ballpark Village - now proposed to have 1,929 rooms - becomes a reality.
The hotel, first proposed last summer, was set to be the biggest in San Diego County with 1,650 rooms. Now, the downtown property is positioned to be Marriott's flagship convention destination on the Pacific.
But it also could create more traffic and parking headaches for people who live in the East Village, downtown's fastest-growing residential area.
At least one hotel consultant is puzzled by Marriott's timing as tourism experts are downgrading their projections because of the deteriorating national economy. Besides this behemoth project, at least 5,000 hotel rooms are in the development pipeline for downtown San Diego.
Marriott may be spurred on by competition from Gaylord Entertainment, which is angling to build a 1,500- to 2,000-room hotel and convention center on Chula Vista's bayfront.
"Marriott's strategy is to be the biggest kid on block," said hotel consultant Jerry Morrison. "They are expanding in all markets beyond where other brands would normally expand, in terms of how many hotels you put in the same market under the same flag."
Marriott operates four hotels downtown and is developing this and two others in the city center.
A San Diego Convention Center spokesman said Marriott's move does not compete with the center's hopes for expansion. In fact, it may help San Diego attract lucrative mega-meetings, instead of losing them to other cities.
One example, said convention center Vice President Steven Johnson, is San Diego Comic-Con International, the high-profile pop-culture convention.
"They are bursting at the seams here now," Johnson said.
The extra exhibit space at the proposed Marriott - and at the 1,200-room Hilton under construction east of the center - might allow San Diego to keep Comic-Con here after its contract is up in 2012.
More hotel rooms downtown play a role in attracting conventions.
Tracey Adams, national sales manager at San Diego's PRA Destination Management, said that if an 8,000-person convention books in San Diego, the attendees might be spread over four or five hotels. Las Vegas' mega-hotels, with 3,000 rooms and up, can accommodate that convention in one or two hotels.
"We'd be able to compete more effectively with cities like Las Vegas," Adams said.
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