The much-anticipated $110 million expansion and renovation of Chicago’s Hyatt Regency McCormick Place is nearly complete, and General Manager Paul Daly is understandably excited about what the future holds for meeting groups at the property.
“We’re viewing it as a new hotel and a grand reopening,” Daly says.
The renovation added an entirely new guest tower with 460 guest rooms and additional Prairie Room meeting spaces with floor-to-ceiling windows, while the existing 800 guest rooms were udpated to match the new ones. The renovation is scheduled to finish this month and the new tower will open in June.
Connected to the city’s giant McCormick Place convention center, the Hyatt Regency has strong bookings when citywide conventions are in town, and has become more popular with stand-alone groups as well.
“The property originally opened 15 years ago,” Daly says. “It was a big deal at the time that there was a hotel connected to the McCormick Center. As it evolved, the hotel added its own 45,000 square feet of conference space and we’ve seen more and more groups treating it like a big conference property.”
Hyatt also streamlined the partnership with McCormick Place, allowing planners to book directly into the center’s 2.6 million square feet of exhibit halls and 170 meeting rooms.
The properties have great synergy,” Daly says, “This gives us a lot of availability and flexibility, so we’ve seen tremendous excitement from groups.