Omni Adds a Lifestyle Hotel Flavor to Hedge Against Convention Business

Early Check-In

Editor’s Note: Skift Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill brings readers exclusive reporting and insights into hotel deals and development, and how those trends are making an impact across the travel industry.

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It’s a Friday night in Boston, and Coquette, one of the city’s hottest new restaurants, is buzzing with a local crowd sipping cocktails and devouring French fare like clams gratiné around the cozy, brick- and mural-adorned dining room. 

But perhaps the more striking hospitality detail of this new French-inspired restaurant is that it isn’t some hidden gem on one of Boston’s typical high streets. It’s attached to a 1,054-room convention hotel in a neighborhood once described as having “all the charm of an office park in a suburb of Dallas.”

Omni’s $550 million Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport was one of two new convention hotels the company opened last year — not exactly the best time to cater rooms to the meetings and events industry. The pandemic wasn’t exactly ushering in the kind of major events that kept rooms occupied at Omni’s extensive mix of hotels in the vicinity of major convention centers. 

But company leaders have made several plays in recent years, including prior to the pandemic, to make their brand a more durable business. Omni even sold off five hotels, four in Texas and one in Florida, last August, noting the properties no longer aligned with the new direction of the company. 

A company release last month noted Omni would reinvest the money made off the sale into the convention center and resort market space — a sign there is still optimism around the eventual return of the convention business. The company's new take on convention hotels works more at courting weekend business just as much as they would normally c