Claude Molinari spent 10 years managing Huntington Place Convention Center and is now president and CEO of Visit Detroit. He knows better than anyone that having a hotel connected to the convention center has long been a critical need.
Now, the Sterling Group in Detroit and the Detroit Regional Convention Facility Authority (for which Molinari serves as chairperson) have announced that the hotel under construction on the site of the former Joe Louis Arena and connected to Huntington Place by skyway will open as the JW Marriott Detroit Water Square.
“Over the last five years we’ve lost over 500,000 room nights for events that chose not to come to Detroit for the sole reason that we do not have enough hotel rooms within walking distance of the convention center,” Molinari says. “Of that nearly 600,000, 500,000 specifically were just ‘You don’t have a hotel room attached to your convention center, we’re not coming, that’s it.’
“It was a huge impediment to our ability to move forward, when you look at our competition that has literally thousands of hotel rooms attached to their building,” he continues, “It put us at a grave competitive disadvantage.”
The new 25-story JW Marriott Detroit Water Square will feature 600 rooms, along with a 20,000-square-foot ballroom and 50,000 square feet of meeting space, Molinari says. He also notes that the amount of meeting space within the hotel will mean the convention center does not have to build another ballroom. Huntington Place currently has 725,000 square feet of exhibit space with a 40,000-square-foot ballroom and more than 150,000 square feet devoted to meeting rooms.
Even with the new JW Marriott Detroit Water Square and other recent hotel openings and renovations downtown, the city still falls short by about 2,000 rooms of where it needs to be to compete for major pieces of business. “If we added 3,000 hotel rooms to Detroit downtown today—snap your fingers—it would only put us in the middle of our competitive set,” Molinari says, citing markets like Indianapolis, Nashville, and Pittsburgh in comparison.
However, Molinari also says the new hotel should make developers take notice of Detroit when considering new locations to build. “This hotel should be a call to action for other developers around the world that Detroit is a place on the move,” he says. “They should reach out to us about additional hotels because the rooms are needed here.”
Construction of the JW Marriott Detroit Water Square is underway, with completion expected in time for the NCAA Men’s Final Four Tournament in Detroit in March 2027.
