Fairfield Inn & Suites plan 2025 opening while City, Chamber celebrate Spartanburg growth

Samantha Swann, Spartanburg Herald-Journal
·2 min read

Downtown Spartanburg saw a celebratory groundbreaking on Monday for the Fairfield Inn & Suites on East St. John Street.

Crews started working on the site, located beside the Montgomery Building, this past summer.

Samir Patel, director of development for Hawkeye Hotels, said the group is planning a spring 2025 opening.

The five-floor, 136-room hotel has been in the works since 2019. Hawkeye Hotels is a family-owned hotel development and management company based in Iowa. The development of downtown Spartanburg caught the company's eye.

"We'd been eyeing the Spartanburg-Greenville market for about a decade, just waiting for the right opportunity to arise," Patel said. "Back in 2019, we came here, and we found this site right in the heart of downtown and just immediately fell in love with the location, the city."

The beginnings of the foundation and plumbing can be seen at the site. Andrew Cope, CEO of J.M. Cope Construction Company, the project's builder, said crews will begin pouring the hotel's foundation soon. Passersby should see vertical construction in the new year.

A groundbreaking was held for the new Fairfield Inn & Suites hotel in Spartanburg on Dec. 18, 2023. The new hotel will be on St. John Street next to the Montgomery Building. Spartanburg Mayor Jerome Rice looks over plans for the project and how it will look in the downtown Spartanburg area.
A groundbreaking was held for the new Fairfield Inn & Suites hotel in Spartanburg on Dec. 18, 2023. The new hotel will be on St. John Street next to the Montgomery Building. Spartanburg Mayor Jerome Rice looks over plans for the project and how it will look in the downtown Spartanburg area.

Representatives from OneSpartanburg, Inc. and the city of Spartanburg attended, including City Council members Jaime Fulmer and Janie Salley, Mayor Jerome Rice, and City Manager Chris Story.

Story said the location of the hotel was terrific. The hotel will be convenient to The University of South Carolina Upstate's George Dean Johnson, Jr. College of Business, the Montgomery Building and the Chapman Cultural Center. The space is only a block away from Morgan Square, where major renovations are planned.

"It'll put a lot of positive energy and traffic in a key spot of downtown," Story said.

A groundbreaking was held for the new Fairfield Inn & Suites hotel in Spartanburg on Dec. 18, 2023. The new hotel will be on St. John Street next to the Montgomery Building. (L-R) Spartanburg city manager Chris Story, city councilmembers Jamie Fulmer District 4, Janie Salley District 5, Spartanburg Mayor Jerome Rice, broke ground with Hawkeye Hotels officials Siuraj Mistry, Samir Patel, and Om Patel in front of the site of the new hotel.

The additional hotel rooms will be essential going into 2025, when the city can expect an increase in tourism due to the opening of the Minor League baseball stadium off West Main Street.

"A new hotel like this is something that's very much needed in Spartanburg but specifically downtown," said Billy Dunlap, chief tourism development officer at OneSpartanburg, Inc. "When we're recruiting events to come here, hotel capacity is one of the first things that they look at, and if we don't have the number of rooms to accommodate that event, then we can't go after that event."

Samantha Swann covers city news, development and culture in Spartanburg. She is a University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College alumna. Contact her at sswann@shj.com or on Instagram at @sam_on_spartanburg.

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Fairfield Inn & Suites eye 2025 opening in downtown Spartanburg