JW Marriott San Antonio Downtown

IBC Bank has filed plans to convert its own downtown office tower, the O'Neil Ford-designed IBC Centre I, into a 300-room JW Marriott, adding a second new tower for parking, event space and a rooftop pool. The $164 million project targets a July 2026 construction start and April 2028 completion, but it still needs Historic and Design Review Commission approval and has not disclosed financing.

The place

The project sits at 130 East Travis Street, on the corner with North St. Mary's Street in downtown San Antonio, a block off the River Walk and within walking distance of the Alamo and the convention district. It is one of the few hotel-conversion proposals downtown where the owner and the developer are the same company: IBC Bank controls the office campus outright and is not acquiring the site, only repurposing it.

The concept

The centerpiece is IBC Centre I, a 13-story office tower completed in 1983 to a design credited to O'Neil Ford's practice, finished after Ford's death in July 1982. The building later served as AT&T's regional headquarters, known locally as Whitacre Tower, before AT&T's 2008 move to Dallas, and more recently housed IBC Bank's own offices alongside tenants including Visionworks. It has never operated as a hotel. The conversion plan would gut and rebuild the tower into roughly 300 guest rooms and add a second, newly built structure of about 14 stories on an adjacent surface lot at Travis and St. Mary's, holding parking, a ballroom, meeting space and a rooftop pool while a smaller companion building on the campus stays in office use. At $164 million, the project is being pitched as a rare owner-financed, ground-up reinvestment in San Antonio's office-heavy downtown core at a moment when several other office-to-hotel conversions in the same submarket have stalled or gone to bankruptcy auction. IBC Bank has publicly targeted a July 2026 construction start, but that date depends on Historic and Design Review Commission sign-off on the tower's massing and treatment, a hearing that had not been scheduled as of the most recent reporting.

Dining & wellness

Filings describe new dining and gathering spaces, a ballroom and event floor, and a rooftop pool deck in the companion tower, but no restaurant concept, chef, or bar program has been named publicly. As with much of the project, food-and-beverage detail is likely to surface only once design review clears and construction financing is finalized.