Cincinnati Marriott Downtown

Portman Holdings and 3CDC broke ground on Cincinnati's long-awaited 700-room convention headquarters hotel on July 21, 2026, a Marriott Hotels property at Fifth and Plum Streets connected by skybridge to the renamed First Financial Center. The $540 million tower is slated to open in late 2028 or early 2029, after financing delays pushed the start of construction well past its original timeline.

The place

The hotel is rising on a former surface parking lot at Fifth and Plum Streets in downtown Cincinnati, immediately south of First Financial Center — the convention venue long known as the Duke Energy Convention Center until a naming-rights deal with First Financial Bank took effect when the $248 million-renovated building reopened in January 2026. A skybridge will link the hotel directly to the convention center and its parking, making the address function as Cincinnati's dedicated convention headquarters.

The concept

This is a ground-up, 21-story, roughly 660,000-square-foot tower developed by Portman Holdings in partnership with 3CDC, operating under Marriott's core Marriott Hotels brand as the city's official convention headquarters property. The $540 million project (about $249 million in public funding against roughly $291 million in private investment) finally closed its financing in June 2026, well behind earlier plans that had targeted a Q4 2025 construction start; Skanska's own construction contract is valued at $325 million. Groundbreaking was held July 21, 2026, after that extended delay, and 3CDC has cited a construction program of about 28 months, pointing to a completion in later 2028 assuming no further slippage. The finished hotel is planned to hold 700 rooms including 36 suites, more than 60,000 square feet of flexible meeting space and multiple ballrooms distributed from the ground floor through the sixth level, topped by a roughly 17,000-square-foot outdoor events terrace.

Dining & wellness

Reporting around the groundbreaking describes a full-service, three-meal restaurant planned for the ground floor and an outdoor bar on the second floor overlooking Fifth Street and First Financial Center, alongside ground-floor retail space. No restaurant name, chef, spa or pool has been announced as of August 2026.