A woman walks down to the grand room in the lobby of the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Conference Center in Aurora during the opening on Dec. 18, 2018. (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)
Colorado’s largest hotel is poised to get bigger.
A proposed expansion at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center would add 450 rooms to the hotel, bringing it to 1,951, according to plans submitted to the city of Aurora last month.
The hotel — which opened in 2018 with 1,500 rooms — and its Nashville-based parent company Ryman Hospitality also plan to build a 74,000-square-foot indoor expansion to its water park, per the filing.
“By increasing the number of available hotel rooms, the Gaylord will be able to attract additional and larger convention groups to the area. The new indoor waterpark will provide a unique guest amenity that will appeal to convention groups as well as the family vacation market,” Scott Sickeler, an architect at Atlanta’s Blur Workshop, wrote to the city on behalf of the hotel.
A spokeswoman for Ryman Hospitality didn’t respond to questions about the expansion, including the timeline.
The new rooms would be built to the southeast of the existing hotel, on a portion of the existing parking lot, plans show. The new water park facility would be between the new rooms and the hotel’s existing indoor-outdoor water park, where tennis and basketball courts currently sit.
The water park addition would include a wave pool, two water slides and an “adventure river,” as well as private cabanas, and a restaurant and bar, Sickeler wrote. It would be branded Soundwaves, and be similar to one already operating at Ryman’s Gaylord Opryland in Nashville.
Expanding Gaylord Rockies, which sits near Denver International Airport, isn’t a new idea. In February 2020, Ryman and the hotel’s co-owner at the time, RIDA Development, announced that 317 rooms would be added by 2022. But the pandemic arrived a month later, and that work never began. Ryman bought RIDA’s stake in the hotel in 2021, becoming sole owner.
And this expansion wouldn’t necessarily be the last at the hotel. Sickeler said in the letter to Aurora that Ryman could add, in addition to the aforementioned 450 rooms, another 550 rooms in the future as part of a “Phase 2.” That would bring the hotel’s count to 2,500.
A woman walks down to the grand room in the lobby of the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Conference Center in Aurora during the opening on Dec. 18, 2018. (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)
Colorado’s largest hotel is poised to get bigger.
A proposed expansion at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center would add 450 rooms to the hotel, bringing it to 1,951, according to plans submitted to the city of Aurora last month.
The hotel — which opened in 2018 with 1,500 rooms — and its Nashville-based parent company Ryman Hospitality also plan to build a 74,000-square-foot indoor expansion to its water park, per the filing.
“By increasing the number of available hotel rooms, the Gaylord will be able to attract additional and larger convention groups to the area. The new indoor waterpark will provide a unique guest amenity that will appeal to convention groups as well as the family vacation market,” Scott Sickeler, an architect at Atlanta’s Blur Workshop, wrote to the city on behalf of the hotel.
A spokeswoman for Ryman Hospitality didn’t respond to questions about the expansion, including the timeline.
The new rooms would be built to the southeast of the existing hotel, on a portion of the existing parking lot, plans show. The new water park facility would be between the new rooms and the hotel’s existing indoor-outdoor water park, where tennis and basketball courts currently sit.
The water park addition would include a wave pool, two water slides and an “adventure river,” as well as private cabanas, and a restaurant and bar, Sickeler wrote. It would be branded Soundwaves, and be similar to one already operating at Ryman’s Gaylord Opryland in Nashville.
Expanding Gaylord Rockies, which sits near Denver International Airport, isn’t a new idea. In February 2020, Ryman and the hotel’s co-owner at the time, RIDA Development, announced that 317 rooms would be added by 2022. But the pandemic arrived a month later, and that work never began. Ryman bought RIDA’s stake in the hotel in 2021, becoming sole owner.
And this expansion wouldn’t necessarily be the last at the hotel. Sickeler said in the letter to Aurora that Ryman could add, in addition to the aforementioned 450 rooms, another 550 rooms in the future as part of a “Phase 2.” That would bring the hotel’s count to 2,500.
