The future of Cape Girardeau’s hotel industry

Cape Girardeau will be one of the best places on Earth to experience the total solar eclipse on April 8, but any out-of-towners who haven’t booked a hotel room for the event by now are finding themselves in the dark already.

“They can forget it,” according to Brenda Newbern, director of Visit Cape, formerly known as the Convention and Visitors Bureau. “As soon as reservations were available, our hotels were filled. It’s been amazing the number of inquiries we’ve had about the eclipse.”

The eclipse is just one of many local events that will draw thousands of visitors to Cape Girardeau this year. Those visitors will fill virtually all the city’s hotel rooms, as well as those in surrounding communities. In fact, local hotel developers say they can’t accommodate all the visitors who want to make hotel reservations here so they’re working to add more capacity.

Workers finish up windows in one of the hotel rooms at The Riverview. The hotel will include an entrance to the casino and the casino's two dining establishments.(Photo by Aaron Eisenhauer)

“Our market has been a little underdeveloped,” said Jeff Maurer, president and CEO of Mayson Capital Partners in Cape Girardeau. “There has been more demand [for hotel rooms] than we could supply.”

Mayson Capital has partnered with Heritage Hospitality Management to operate the 93-room Marriott Courtyard hotel in the former H&H Building on the corner of Broadway and North Fountain Street in downtown Cape and the new Fairfield by Marriott Inn & Suites on Cape West Crossings just south of Bloomfield Road near Interstate 55. Fairfield opened Jan. 17, adding another 103 rooms to Cape Girardeau’s lodging inventory.

Two more sizable projects — Tru by Hilton just south of the Cape Girardeau Sportsplex and an upscale hotel addition to Century Casino on North Main Street — are slated for completion in the near future. Once the new hotels are open, Cape Girardeau will have more than 1,400 hotel and motel rooms within city limits (with hundreds more within a 30-mile radius).

The Tru development is a project of Cape Girardeau-based Midamerica Hotels Corporation which operates hotels in St. Louis, Cape Girardeau and Paducah, Kentucky. Locally, Midamerica’s properties include the Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn and Auburn Place Hotel & Suites, all near the junction of Route K and Interstate 55 in Cape Girardeau.

John Echimovich, Midamerica’s vice president of operations, says the hotel industry suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic as business and leisure travel slowed to a trickle.

“But post-pandemic we’ve definitely seen a major shift in leisure travel,” Echimovich said. “Corporate travel is still rebuilding and is starting to come back, but it’s not quite back to its full pre-pandemic level.”

Cape Girardeau has become a regional center for youth sports and Echimovich credits both the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and Visit Cape for that reputation.

Lyle Randolph and Loren Ramirez are pictured in The Riverview by Century Casino, slated for a grand opening the weekend before the eclipse. In the top right photo, Randolph walks down what will be the premier entrance to Beacon 53. In the bottom photo, Randolph points out points of interest in the view from a circular suite.

“They’ve done an amazing job, especially during COVID,” he said. “They really kept things going with baseball, softball, soccer and other outside tournaments and we did so much better than other competing cities during the height of the pandemic, and we were able to keep the economic engine running. However, we became so popular with weekend tournaments that we often were pushing people to rooms as far away as Sikeston and Perryville because we didn’t have the ability in town to house all of those guests.”

The four-story Tru by Hilton, slated to open late this year or in early 2025, will be especially convenient for anyone attending or participating in activities at the Sportsplex. “It will be the first Tru in our region,” Echimovich reported, adding that it will have “a little different style” than other accommodations managed by Midamerica Hotels.

“It will have an emphasis on an amazing lobby area that will be the focal point of the hotel,” he said. “It will be an area where people can meet and will be wonderful for social groups, teams, etc.”

The lobby will also include a billiard table, leisure spaces and a “local wall” featuring information and staff recommendations for local restaurants, entertainment venues and other attractions and points of interest guests might visit while in Cape Girardeau.

One of Cape Girardeau’s “points of interest” is Century Casino where a $30 million hotel addition overlooking the Mississippi River is nearing completion with a grand opening date slated for April 4. “Everything is on track and moving along for that date,” according to Lyle Randolph, the casino’s general manager. He expects all rooms at the new hotel to be occupied not only by visitors coming to Cape for the solar eclipse April 8, but also by alumni and others attending the Sesquicentennial Ball at Southeast Missouri State University on April 6.

There’s been talk of adding a hotel to the casino even before it opened in 2012.

“It’s one of those things that’s been in discussion since the casino arrived and now, we’ve seen the visitor growth in Cape Girardeau with all the things the city has done to promote itself and we just felt like now is the time for us to add a hotel to bring in additional folks,” Randolph said.

The casino’s six-story hotel will include both standard guest rooms and suites with many of the suites featuring panoramic views of the river, the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge and downtown Cape Girardeau. Guest amenities will include in-room dining and multiple food and beverage options as well as dry cleaning and spa services in partnership with local businesses, according to casino hotel manager Loren Ramirez.

“What we’re going for is closer to a full-service hotel,” he said. “We’re going to be very flexible so if guests want to have a massage in their room, we’ll be able to schedule that or we can also schedule with an off-site spa location.”

Randolph expects the casino hotel will be attractive to “gaming-centric” customers, “but one of the things I’m also excited about is bringing people here who may not be aware of all the things that are unique about downtown Cape Girardeau, and this is one of the things that will be a focus for us.”

Maurer says he anticipates more business travel this year and in the future which Fairfield Inn, Tru, the Century Casino hotel and other local lodging facilities will help accommodate.

“It’s not just a matter of demand for hotel rooms on the weekends, but there’s also a growing demand from salespeople and various folks that have resumed business travel during the week,” Maurer said and credited Visit Cape for its efforts in support of the local lodging industry.

The view from The Riverview by Century Casino is pictured. All center rooms in the hotel will have floor to ceiling windows.

While the COVID-19 pandemic caused a slump in business travel, Cape Girardeau wasn’t impacted as much as other communities, according to Newbern at Visit Cape.

“We didn’t go down as far as some of our counterparts in the state,” she said. “We were able to keep some of our youth sports going so that helped us not hit rock bottom, but now we are more than coming back.”

Visit Cape, Newbern said, is continuing efforts to bring more weekday business travelers to Cape Girardeau to complement youth sports and other activities on most weekends.

“What we really have to try to get are groups coming during the week,” she said. “We’re targeting more business conferences and sporting groups that would have tournaments during the week like we saw with the MSHSAA (Missouri State High School Activities Association) volleyball tournament.”

Large business conferences and events like the state volleyball tournament are profitable for local hotels, restaurants and other retail establishments that cater to travelers. They also generate revenue for Cape Girardeau through the city’s 3% hotel/motel tax, which was approved by voters in 1983 and reapproved in 1998.

Hotel/motel tax revenue has more than doubled over the past 20 years and in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 (July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2023) the tax amounted to more than $1 million ($1,052,067) for the first time.

Now, six months into FY24, Newbern says the tax, which supports Visit Cape, Cape Splash Water Park and other city-owned sports-related facilities, should easily generate more than $1.1 million.

That’s good news for Newbern and local hotel proprietors. For them, the only thing that could dampen their outlook is a cloudy forecast for the solar eclipse on April 8.