Faced with choosing a hotel proposal from four competing developers, Kissimmee’s Board of Commissioners told all the bidders to go back to the drawing board and come back in June with a new plan.
Hospitality workers cloaked in union T-shirts packed the room and coalesced behind the proposal from Kissimmee Place Development Group for a 300-room Hyatt Place hotel and convention center adjacent to the Toho Square parking garage.
But Mayor Jackie Espinosa said there wouldn’t be enough parking at the garage to accommodate the project. “The Hyatt is beautiful …the lighting, the gazebos, everything they’re planning on doing is magnificent,” she said. “It does bring that class, but my concern is that it’s too much.”
None of the commissioners strongly endorsed any of the concepts. The proposals from KPDG and Azure Hotel Holdings were too lavish, while the ones from Skyview Companies and IHRMC Hotels & Resorts weren’t ambitious enough. And soon it became clear that a majority wanted a residential component at the Toho Square site.
Espinosa said she felt like Goldilocks, trying each project on for size and not liking the fit. “So perhaps a solution would be to pivot, and not accept the Toho proposals, and let’s think about housing,” she said. Could they bring back a revised plan in 30 days?
So both bidders for the Toho site immediately offered to join forces and bring back a hybrid of their projects that would capitalize on their strengths, with KPDG building a 160-room hotel and Skyview developing the retail and residential. As they huddled together in the lobby to strategize, KPDG’s Juan Lopez said they could keep the Hyatt flag and replace what would have been a second phase of the hotel with condos or lofts.
“Listen, we’d rather work together on something that’s really good, that’s tailor-made to the comments that the city commission made and hopefully find some middle ground,” Lopez said. “We’d much rather have 50% than zero.”
It was a similar story for the two developers bidding for a hotel deal on the Kissimmee Civic Center site.
Commissioner Carlos Alvarez favored the super-luxury hotel 300-room and convention center proposed by Azure Hotel Holdings, but Vice Mayor Angela Eady said their concept was unrealistic. “It’s breathtaking, but we’re not in Dubai,” Eady said. “Let’s be honest. We can’t do that.”
Azure CEO Ramon Gomez said they could reduce the hotel to 200 rooms, but it wouldn’t be large enough to support a 40,000-square-foot convention center. So they would also have to scale down the meeting space. “We have to redo the whole thing,” he said. “We can do it — that’s no problem. We have to do some magic.”
All of the commissioners liked the Hilton Garden proposal, but thought the 120-room prototype was too small. IHRMC Senior VP Megan Stuart said the room count was based on a feasibility study, that factored in their plan to renovate the existing civic center into a modern convention center. “We would be willing to increase it slightly, but anything over 150 rooms would be excessive,” she said.
So again, commissioners asked both groups to resubmit their proposals with 150-200 rooms in 30 days.
Tuesday’s hotel discussion took place while the city was prepping for two more high-profile development projects.
The city’s Planning Advisory Board will meet this week to advance KPDG’s plan to build an extended-stay hotel at Kissimmee Gateway Airport. The developer wants to lease property in the city’s Gateway Airport Commerce Park for the hotel and would limit guests’ stays to no more than 60 days.
KPDG’s Santiago Fernanez said the hotel would serve an immediate need for the aviation community, particularly lodging for flight students who often need extended stays to meet their training requirements. The Hyatt Studios would be a prototype design that could be completed in 18 months. “If everything goes fantastic, we could be operational in the last quarter of 2026,” Fernandez said. The long-term goal would be to develop a larger flight academy on the adjacent 6 acres.
The city also issued a Request for Qualifications to find a developer that will buy the vacant K-mart and Big Lots stores on W. Vine Street and raze them for a new mixed-use project. The city bought the 22-acre site for $14 million last year and has a conceptual plan that calls for retail mixed-use buildings and a hotel on the Vine Street frontage and multifamily residential on the northern half of the assemblage.
The RFQ states that the city will not accept any proposals that call for reusing the big box stores. Proposals are due July 22.
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