A five-story, 144-room hotel opens its doors to guests Tuesday on a downtown Fresno corner that sat empty for a generation. The Courtyard by Marriott Fresno Downtown rises at the corner of M and Inyo streets, right next to the Fresno Convention Center, finally filling a gap that city leaders had been trying to patch since at least the late 1990s.
According to the Fresno Bee, the hotel is operated by Axis Hotel Group, Inc., which has put more than $30 million into the project. The property includes 94 king rooms, 42 double-queen rooms and eight suites, along with a pool and fire pit, a fitness center, guest laundry, and an on-site bistro open to guests and the public from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. It also adds nearly 5,500 square feet of meeting and event space, including a 4,000-square-foot conference room, the paper reports.
Nicholas Bains, Axis Hotel Group's regional vice president, said the company is committed to high-quality hotels and guest experience, and that Axis aims to provide a comfortable stay in Fresno County. He added that Axis is proud to be part of downtown Fresno, per the same report. Axis already operates six Marriott, Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn Express branded properties in Fresno and Clovis.
A Lot That Outlasted Three Different Hotel Deals
A Lot That Outlasted Three Different Hotel Deals By 2022, Fresno leaders had been trying for nearly 25 years to develop a hotel on this vacant site, according to a Fresno Bee column. The first attempt came in 1998, when a 10-story, 400-room Sheraton with three restaurants and a full-sized health club was proposed as part of a convention center expansion — a deal that never materialized. A later proposal, described in reporting as either 12 or 14 stories depending on the source, called for a hotel with a second floor connecting directly into the convention center; that deal also fell through.
The city bought the parcel in 2005 to try to lure a developer, though the purchase price is reported differently across outlets: the Fresno Bee column put it at $3.1 million, while KVPR reported it as $3 million. KVPR noted that even after the purchase, previous efforts to attract a hotel stalled.
The 2017 Deal That Kept Shrinking
In December 2017, the city struck a new deal, selling the corner lot under an agreement meant to bring a four-story, 200-room hotel to the site by 2020. The sale price is also reported two ways: the Fresno Bee cited $644,688, while KVPR reported the sale to Metro Hospitality Services as $644,000. KVPR reported on the planned 200-room hotel.
That 2020 target came and went. By 2022, the plan had been revised into the five-story, 144-room design that ultimately got built — one additional floor but 56 fewer rooms than the 2017 version, the Fresno Bee column noted. That same report said the project was scheduled for December 2024 completion, an estimate that, like earlier timelines, did not hold. The Fresno Bee's more recent reporting notes the hotel had a revised timeline and reduced design following the pandemic, and was at one point expected to open in August.
Underground Utility Work Added Costs and Delays
Construction broke ground in 2022, and the project's original ambitions were larger still: the initial concept called for an eight-story hotel with 220 rooms and a larger banquet hall before Axis scaled it back. Bains told the Fresno Bee that degraded underground PG&E lines forced more project work than expected. “The underground PG&E lines were degraded somewhat, so we had to have a lot more work in developing this project than expected,” he said.
Downtown Fresno has not seen comparable new-hotel construction since the 1980s, the Fresno Bee reports, and a nearby Radisson hotel closed in 2022. In 2017, the Courtyard was the only planned or under-construction hotel in downtown Fresno, even as nine hotels were planned or under construction across Fresno and Clovis. The city estimates the new hotel will generate an additional $900,000 in annual hotel tax revenue.
The long wait was visible to anyone riding past the construction site; a Fresno Area Express bus passed the hotel on M Street in June as crews continued finishing work. Now, after proposals that stretched from a 400-room Sheraton to a scaled-back Courtyard, downtown Fresno finally has its hotel next to the convention center it was meant to serve.
