Written by Michael Lewis on November 19, 2025
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With global airports touting shiny modern hotels, Miami International Airport has for decades been trying to replace its 66-year-old hotel that multiple aviation directors have labeled inadequate at best.
Efforts to replace it led to a July 2023 vote to add a modern 451-room hotel to be built by two of this area’s biggest names and be ready to open – finally – in 2026, when the current hotel would be a shameful two-thirds of a century old.
So it was jaw-dropping last week when an airport official told a committee that the hotel isn’t really due to open until 2029 and is so enmeshed in red tape that it has yet to get the go-ahead to even begin construction 28 months after commissioners approved the deal.
At this point, even 2029 seems like just an aspiration.
Miami International Airport is our economic engine. Our hallmark visitor industry now supports 150,700 jobs. That’s nearly 11% of total county payroll workers. And what do we offer visitors when they arrive? A 66-year-old hotel.
“I had an opportunity to be a customer of our airport hotel and it’s not the best experience, to put it lightly,” Commissioner Keon Hardemon told a committee looking at the new airport hotel in 2023. “I know that we can do better in Miami-Dade County.”
But we haven’t done better.
“Even somebody at the administration has admitted to me already the existing airport hotel, there’s no way to ever make it competitive with other airports,” Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez told the county’s Government Efficiency & Transparency Committee last week as he poked and prodded to learn why construction hasn’t yet begun on a hotel contract signed more than two years ago.
The approval came in a heavily lobbied fight between two bidders. The lease for 50 years on airport land was finally awarded to FDR Miami, a joint operation by Stephen Ross, the Miami Dolphins owner who runs one of the nation’s best-known development firms, and Jeffrey Sopher, who controls the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel.
But to the efficiency committee, Mr. Bermudez pointed toward inaction on the hotel in one of the nation’s prime visitor communities.
“Anybody who’s been to the existing hotel knows that it’s not necessarily the most modern – you wouldn’t tell your friend to stay there even through it’s in the airport. It requires a lot of work, which is why we looked at the new hotel,” he noted. “My concerned is it was supposed to be … finished in June of 2026.”
The current issue is that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hasn’t approved plans for the hotel. It rejected a first set and hasn’t acted on revisions. The federal shutdown didn’t help.
“Three years later and we still haven’t put the first shovel in the ground,” Mr. Bermudez lamented.
“The Aviation Department has been working with the developer in moving forward with the design, and the Westin Hotel is currently under redesign due to an FAA height requirement,” Sarah Abate, assistant aviation director for concessions and business development, told the committee.
“Have FAA height requirements changed from August of 2023?” Mr. Bermudez asked.
Not exactly. “The issue is that FAA is the only one that knows the requirements” for building heights, Ms. Abate said. “The airport doesn’t know the impact to navigational aids.”
“I drive down 36th Street. I see the FAA offices. Do I have to go and knock on their door?” Mr. Bermudez asked.
“If the entity that was awarded the contract can’t do it,” he added, “it’s better to know it earlier than later, because if not we’re going to be back in the same problem we had with Airport City,” a past attempt to add an airport hotel. “It was awarded in 2014 … eight years after the fact, nothing had happened.”
“So,” Mr. Bermudez asked, “how much longer is the county going to have to wait to have a modern facility to be able to compete with other airports?”
He said FDR, in being awarded the contract, pledged to open in June 2026, so “when are we going to get a hotel?”
“They have until 2029 to complete the building. That is linked to their receiving their permit,” Ms. Abate replied.
Mr. Bermudez said that while the contract may say 2029, commissioners in awarding it were told 2026. “Why didn’t we get told that was the case?”
Referring to recent state claims of inefficiencies in the county, Mr. Bermudez said “this is an example of what people point to. You’re opening up a Pandora’s box by not holding yourself to the standard that should be better than just good. Look around the state.”
We don’t have to look around the state to know that a hotel that opened in 1959 at Miami International Airport isn’t good enough today.
“This is an issue that I’m not going to let go,” Mr. Bermudez said. And he shouldn’t.
No one entity is to blame – federal and county officials and developers are involved, and all want this hotel built and open. But it’s now 20 years late for the marketplace and getting later. Let’s see the efficiency committee actually make us more efficient. For the visitor industry, it’s vital.