AUSTIN, Texas — The city of Austin is undeniably in store for a period of disruption with the city's convention center closing for a yearslong renovation and expansion, but the city's top tourism official said they remain hopeful they can ride out the storm by taking a networked approach utilizing smaller event spaces.
During the 2025 fall meeting of the Hospitality Asset Managers Association, Visit Austin President and CEO Tom Noonan said the $1.6 billion project is not slated to be complete until December 2028. The renovation will nearly double the center's total rentable space, expanding it to 620,000 square feet — 550,000 square feet for its interior and 70,000 square feet outdoors. He added the first event at the expanded space is slated to be SXSW in 2029.
"We also have about 80 tentative groups on books for the future building, right now," he said. "We have about 15 of those that are contracted with about another dozen that are verbal definites."
The convention center expansion's cost more than doubled from its original projection of $700 million, Noonan said.
While the expanded space will obviously be a boon to the Austin market and hotels in it, the interim period will present a significant challenge for a 40-month period compared to other cities that keep some portion of their convention centers open and operating, Noonan said.
"I think we're the first major city in America to go through that process, to walk away from" having an operating convention center," he said. "But the idea of building half, tearing down the second half and being under construction for seven years was just unattainable."
Visit Austin will soon be running a campaign to show it can "do meetings in Austin differently."
"We've got about 60 people in sales and marketing together," he said. "We had ownership groups, and we have people from destination marketing companies. We had transportation companies, and ... We had everybody together talking about how we market the city during those years. And so the idea is that, yeah, we're going to incentivize a lot of in-house business. We're going to do things that we're calling like 'mini-wides' versus city-wides."
He said the city's available hotel stock and meeting space will be key to meeting that objective.
"So let's go get the JW Marriott a 1,500-room piece of business or a 1,700 piece of business and let it overflow to the [Austin Marriott Downtown] or other hotels downtown," he said. "Let's do the same thing for Fairmont. Let's do the same thing for Hilton. Let's do it for the Renaissance up north. Let's do that for the Hyatt. And even if we have a 500-room lead for a 300-room hotel, we still do that mini-wide concept and overflow."
While collaboration is going to be key for bridging the gap for the roughly three years of disruption, Noonan said communication hasn't gone perfectly in the early days of the project. He added local hotel leaders who are stakeholders in Visit Austin didn't necessarily pass information up the food chain.
SXSW will continue to take place in Austin even with the convention center down, which Noonan believes should send a message to planners.
"If SXSW can stay here in Austin when we don't have a convention center, we can make your meeting work here in Austin by using different hotels," he said.
Over the next few years, SXSW will revert to a format seen more in its earlier days, Noonan said.
"SXSW existed before our convention center existed," he said. "So it was a campus-style event. We're repurposing that campus. They're using all of our big-box hotels for general session rooms and speed rooms and registration and doing all those things, but they're still using venues downtown and the team has stepped up saying 'We want to help you market it, and we want to help you offset some of the costs you've had.'"
One of the problem areas early in the convention center shutdown was an apparent lack of communication that the local hotel leaders who work with Visit Austin and corporate leaders. It's an experience that happened to White Lodging despite its heavy concentration in Austin, CEO Jean-Luc Barone said.
"Our customers found out [the convention center was closing] before I did," he said. "That came as a big shock, and the relationship that we have today did not start the way of watching it right now."
Noonan said that came as a shock on his end, too.
"I would say the surprise I had was that the connection between your general manager wasn't as knowledgeable [as I assumed. All of these [general managers] are on my board, and we have these conversations. And I'm like, 'Your hotel ownership groups didn't know this?' That was a surprise to me."
White Lodging, which owns, operates and develops hotels, has 12 hotels and 10 restaurants in Austin. Barone said he remains high on the city on a long-term basis.
"Between technology companies moving into Austin, the expansion of the convention center, the expansion of the airport, the fact that it's a business-friendly environment for the most part, we love Austin," he said.
White Lodging hopes to leverage its market concentration into a strength during the interim period with the convention center, Barone said.
"We've clustered the entire system so any one sales manager can sell the entire 12 hotels," Barone said. "That's 220,000 square feet of meeting space. That's nine ballrooms, et cetera, et cetera. So we're trying to create our own sort of demand, and so far, it's working."
He said there's been a strategic and demand shift in for White Lodging in Austin.
"What I learned, too, is that we had gotten lazy," Barone said. "It was easy to take a block of 500 or 600 or 700 rooms at the JW, but we weren't making as much money. [Now] we're making great margins because it's rooms only."
He said a shift to a more transient-heavy mix is helping get "significantly more dollars to the bottom line."
Airport changes
In addition to the convention center project, Austin officials also have plans for a $4 billion expansion of its airport, but the current timeline doesn't call for completion until some point in the 2030s.
Noonan said the airport will be adding more than 20 gates by "the early 2030s" with significant demand from airlines eager to expand in the market.
"The airport, obviously, is so hot right now that we've gone out to the marketplace and Delta bought nine gates," he said. "And I mean bought nine gates. They're paying for the construction of them. Southwest Airlines is doing that. No other airport that we know of is able to do that right now. Airlines want to be in Austin."