Location Nashville, Tennessee Management Marriott International | Opening November 1977 Floor count 7 | |
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Owner Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc. Architect Earl Swensson Associates | ||
Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, formerly known as Opryland Hotel, is a large hotel and convention center located in Nashville, Tennessee. It is owned by Gaylord Hotels, a division of Ryman Hospitality Properties (formerly known as Gaylord Entertainment Company), and operated by Marriott International. It is one of the largest hotels in the world.
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History
The original Opryland Hotel opened on Thanksgiving Day in 1977, on land adjacent to the former Opryland USA amusement park. The hotel was originally built to support the Grand Ole Opry, a Nashville country music institution. The hotel at that time had 580 guest rooms and a ballroom. The Magnolia Lobby was designed to resemble a grand Southern mansion with an impressive staircase and a Tiffany-style chandelier.
In 1983-84 the hotel was expanded, adding over 400 guest rooms and incorporating facilities to meet the demands of the corporate meeting and convention market. A Garden Conservatory resembling a Victorian garden was added. This atrium maintained a constant temperature of 71 degrees and housed more than 10,000 plants.
In 1988, 2 acres and 797 guest rooms were added to the hotel. The Cascades Atrium was built, including a 3.5-story waterfall and more than 8,000 tropical plants. The Cascades Lobby expanded to 24 check-in stations that could check in 580 guests per hour when necessary.
A 4.5-acre expansion completed in 1996 doubled the size of the resort, adding approximately 1,000 guest rooms, 10 meeting rooms, a 289,000-square-foot exhibit hall and a 57,000-square-foot ballroom. The trademark feature of this addition was the Cajun-themed Delta Atrium, which incorporated a quarter-mile-long indoor river. Flatboats were introduced to carry guests along the river, and past a water feature that included jets which were choreographed to music. When the expansion was christened, water samples from more than 1,700 rivers throughout the world (including every registered river in the United States) were poured into the Delta River. The Old Hickory Steak House, built to resemble an antebellum-style mansion, was also added.
On October 26, 2001, Opryland Hotel Nashville was rebranded as Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center (or Gaylord Opryland, for short), taking its name from its corporate parent. Company officials at the time stated that the "Opryland" branding was strong to Nashville (and Texas, initially), but did not fit with projects in other parts of the United States. According to a 2003 press release, Gaylord Opryland planned to build a 5,000-seat amphitheatre on the site in the near future, but those plans seem to have been abandoned in favor of a convention center expansion.
On May 2, 2010, a flood devastated Nashville and caused considerable damage to the Opryland Hotel. Guests were evacuated as the flood waters rose as high as 10 feet in some parts of the hotel. The hotel underwent renovations and reopened Nov. 15, 2010. Repairs and renovations to the famed hotel included the addition of five restaurants and restoration of the atriums and guest rooms.
On January 19, 2012 Gaylord Entertainment announced a new partnership with Dolly Parton's The Dollywood Company to build a new water and seasonal snow park on acreage the company owns across Briley Parkway from Gaylord Opryland. The $50 Million Phase 1 of the overall project was expected to open in Spring of 2014. On September 28, 2012, Dolly decided to withdraw her partnership in the new Nashville theme park.
Wi-fi Jamming Controversy
On October 3, 2014 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission imposed a $600,000 fine on Marriott for willful interference with private Wi-fi hotspot connections linking its clients' portable computers to client-owned mobile telephones in the hotel's convention space.
The scheme abused a "containment" feature of a Wi-Fi monitoring system which was designed for the nominally lawful purpose of removing unwanted "rogue access points" from corporations' own local area networks. Marriott misused the system to send spurious de-authentication packets to client-owned wireless access points, which is unlawful as these are not part of Marriott's network but are owned by individual mobile subscribers. The fraudulent packets, which dissociate consumers’ devices from their own Wi-Fi hotspot access points, were sent deliberately as a means to force convention-goers to buy wireless Internet access from the hotel at rates from $250-1000 per access point.
According to FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc. “It is unacceptable for any hotel to intentionally disable personal hotspots while also charging consumers and small businesses high fees to use the hotel’s own Wi-Fi network. This practice puts consumers in the untenable position of either paying twice for the same service or forgoing Internet access altogether.” Despite the substantial fine, Marriott continues to deny that its conduct is illegal, saying it was using FCC approved equipment to protect its customers from hackers.