Northwest Arkansas Sees Upsurge In Hotels

The 142-room Compton Hotel is set to open in fall 2025 on the downtown Bentonville Square. It was developed by Blue Crane. [Michael Woods]

The hotel pipeline in northwest Arkansas is flowing again as the industry tries to keep up with the region’s growing population and demand.

Northwest Arkansas is centered on Washington and Benton counties, home to the area’s four major cities: Bentonville, Fayetteville, Rogers and Springdale. The region is in the midst of growth that has seen population increase in the past decade by nearly 20% to more than 550,000. Experts expect northwest Arkansas to approach 1 million residents by 2045.

Regional leaders and the business community have tried to keep pace with new amenities, more housing and better infrastructure. One sector that has lagged behind is hotel capacity, which industry officials hope is finally being addressed.

“If you think about the supply-demand metric, it happened somewhat on the housing side, but it is exacerbated on the hotel side,” said Jeremy Hudson, CEO of Specialized Real Estate Group in Fayetteville. “Think about the last time any significant hotel product was built in any of these cities. You have to go back a long time to look at hotel developments that were happening within the core of any of our cities.”

That’s not the case anymore. Hudson oversaw the construction of the 78-room Stonebreaker Hotel on Markham Hill in downtown Fayetteville. The hotel opened earlier this year and is part of an expansive development that includes a high-end restaurant and event center in the historic Pratt Place Barn, as well as 110 acres of protected forest.

SREG is building the 131-room Moxy Hotel in Fayetteville. In downtown Bentonville, construction is finishing up on The Compton, a 142-room hotel that is being developed by Blue Crane, a subsidiary of the Walton family’s Runway Group.

All told, northwest Arkansas is scheduled to have nine hotels with a total of more than 1,100 rooms open this year. In the next three years, the region is expected to add nearly 1,900 rooms. Additional hotels are working their way through the various planning and approval protocols.

Boutique Need

The Stonebreaker and The Compton, as well as the soon-to-be completed AC Hotel by Marriott on the Walmart Inc. campus in Bentonville, are upscale hotels with attractive and pricey amenities in desirable locations.

Hudson and other tourism officials said that northwest Arkansas had fallen behind in all the different styles of hotel room offerings: the higher priced boutique rooms, the standard economy rooms and the zero-frills motel-style rooms.

The truth behind northwest Arkansas’ popularity is that for every family visiting the area for a football game there is a C-suite executive visiting to do business. Each visitor has different wants, and the boutique hotel is aimed at the executive, who wants fine dining and proximity to attractions such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art or the Razorback Greenway trail system and isn’t worried about the room charge.

“You’re going to see a lot of visitors and meetings that want to see some of our new venues, new products, and it’s going to be a new experience for them,” said Kalene Griffith, CEO of Visit Bentonville, the city’s tourism bureau. “I think the business traveler that does business with Walmart is going to want to come to our city to see the new campus, which is going to benefit our industry.

Northwest Arkansas Hotel Scene

*2025 Hotels

*Scheduled opening (Source: Visit Bentonville)

“With all the amenities coming in, my vision is that we’re going to have more visitors than we’ve ever had in our community because of the new Walmart home office, the Whole Health Institute and Alice Walton School of Medicine, and the Crystal Bridges expansion to continue to see new visitors or visitors returning.”

Hudson said modern business travelers want more from their hotel.

“The two biggest components of the northwest Arkansas economy and two of the huge components of the Arkansas economy are business and tourism,” Hudson said. “With the Fortune 500 companies we’ve got here and all of those vendors, we know there is a ton of business travel tied to that. I think that the preference of those business travelers has changed over the past 10 to 20 years.

“They don’t want to come and stay and bring their family to an extended-stay hotel on the edge of town or on the highway. They want to come and stay where they can experience the wonderful downtowns and the wonderful natural amenities and mountain biking and trails and all these different things that Fayetteville and northwest Arkansas has to offer.”

Filling the Void

Rising costs of construction material and labor remain a concern in the hotel industry, but Hudson is confident the current environment will hold for a while.

“All the growth that has happened in northwest Arkansas over the past 20 years, and there was very little hotel development,” Hudson said. “The hotel development that has happened, a large majority of it has been budget-level hotels that have built along I-49. Supply and demand has had a pretty significant imbalance for some time.”

Jennifer Walker, interim CEO of Experience Fayetteville, said the locations of the new hotels are important. In recent years, the region’s main cities have bolstered their downtown profiles, and new hotels will give visitors a place to stay downtown.

“Accessibility to downtown is really tough, so the location of the new hotels is also much appreciated,” Walker said. “You like to have a good healthy mix of age of rooms and class of rooms and type of traveler. We had a real shortage on the upper end of really nice boutique-style rooms. These new hotels are going to really help fill that void.”