Construction of new multi-million dollar hotel underway in Springfield

Springfield will soon see a new $13 million hotel on South MacArthur Boulevard, just a short walk away from the future Scheels Sports Park complex.

Construction of the new Fairfield Inn hotel is currently set to be complete in July 2025. Once complete, the hotel will create up to 35 new jobs with more than 70% of those being full-time hospitality employees.

The Fairfield Inn will be only a stone's throw south of the Springhill Suites by Marriott at 3921 S. MacArthur Boulevard, which needed another hotel as backup for the projected traffic to Scheels Sports Park, according to Springhill Suites General Manager Darin Dame.

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The sporting arena at Legacy Pointe hopes to be Springfield’s hottest destination for competitive games. The sporting plaza is building eight multipurpose outdoor lighted turf fields with a 190,000-square-foot indoor sports dome.

The project will cost up to an estimated $65 million in development costs and is all set to open in 2025.

While the cost of the new Fairfield Inn is separate from the development of Scheels Sports Park, the construction going on at Legacy Pointe helped tip Marriott into the decision for the new hotel.

“With the announcement and the movement of construction over at the sports park,” Dame said. “It did help us to make a decision for construction, yes.”

Contracted by Horve Construction company, the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott will provide 91 new rooms for guests to the hotel with a pool, workout room and other amenities.

The hotel is owned by Legacy Hospitality at Legacy Pointe, where Scheels Sports Complex has been in construction for seven months. Ehrhardt Hospitality, an award-winning hospitality company in Illinois and Missouri, will run the location alongside Springhill.

With the sports park opening by next summer, Dame sees a necessary need for more hotels in the city to cover the need for lodging for tourists to Springfield.

“Currently I feel like we have enough, with our occupancy in the city of Springfield, we have enough hotel rooms to cover,” Dame said. “They are projecting (the sports park) will be increasing occupancy for the entire city, so at that point we could be a little bit short. We are not really sure until we see what kind of volume that brings.”

Claire Grant writes about business, growth and development and other news topics for the State Journal-Register. She can be reached at CLGrant@gannett.com; and on X (Formerly known as Twitter): @Claire_Granted

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Construction of new multi-million dollar hotel underway in Springfield