We started our first full day in Kansas City by visiting the 298,000-square-foot Margaritaville Hotel. This is a 6-story resort whose construction began in June 2023 and is being built by Turner Construction. After almost two years, the hotel is scheduled to be substantially completed by the end of April. The pictures below show the group at the beginning of the tour and a general view of the hotel.

For a Midwest state like Kansas, we didn’t expect there to be a hotel that expressed a tropical passion. However, the 229-room hotel places a big emphasis on the tropical aesthetic. The signage is one of the largest scopes of this project. The hotel will have a heavy quantity of paintings and art on the exterior of the building. The Margaritaville hotel project started with a 150 million dollar budget. However, this didn’t satisfy the owner’s needs. Thus, the engineers winded down the budget to 87 million dollars. Since the project is mostly funded by the state of Kansas, the state mandated that a feature that was unique and not found in any hotel be installed. Thus, the Margaritaville Hotel will include an indoor pool that has a rope people can swing from to jump in the pool. The picture below shows the current progress in the indoor pool. The hotel will also have a public exterior pool with an island in the middle of the pool that can be rented out for private events. There will be a 2-story podium and conference center in addition to the indoor pool.

The most difficult challenge that was mentioned by the project manager was that any small change that was added to one room had to be multiplied by each room which was 229 rooms. This means that any small change that didn’t cost much for one room ended up adding up and being a big change in cost. There are also balconies on the south side of the hotel but not on the north side. This is because there aren’t many interesting views on the north side worth adding balconies to those rooms. Two interesting features of the construction site were the buck hoist and the concrete slabs beneath the concrete walls at the loading bay. The buck hoist can be seen in the picture below and serves as an elevator to move people and materials to different floors of the building. The concrete slabs below the concrete walls at the loading bay have a span of 15 feet on both sides of the wall and are 3 feet thick. One may say they are over-engineered, but what we do know is that the wall isn’t going anywhere.

One non-engineering interesting fact is that there was a lot of consideration for the World Cup in 2026 when designing the Margaritaville Hotel. Kansas City is one of the many host cities in the United States for the 2026 World Cup. Hence, additional security was added to the hotel to meet the standards if teams decided they wanted to stay in the hotel. All around, this was a great and well-enjoyed experience.

Blog by Maximillian Saucedo