Need a place to sleep at Anchorage’s international airport? An on-site hotel could be in the works.
A proposal from a Utah real estate firm and an Anchorage developer.
Anchorage tourists with overnight layovers and seafood processing workers weathered out from flights to the Aleutians could soon have a convenient place to lay their heads other than the airport floor.
A large Utah real estate firm is working with an Anchorage businessman to develop the city’s first on-site airport hotel, on a parcel of land between the domestic and international terminals.
A subsidiary of Salt Lake City-based Woodbury Corp. has applied for a 55-year ground lease of state property for a “high-quality, nationally branded hotel” at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, according to documents released by the Alaska Department of Transportation.
The company is working with Hugh Ashlock, an Anchorage real estate developer who’s a partner in the city’s Dimond Center mall complex, according to the documents.
Their application did not list how many rooms the hotel would contain, or identify the brand. The Alaska Department of Transportation — which manages the airport — is soliciting competing proposals and public comments through Jan. 30.
Neither Ashlock nor officials at Woodbury Corp. responded to requests for comment this week.
A spokesperson for the airport, Lex Yelverton, said the airport “supports economic development.” But she declined to comment specifically on the ground lease proposal, citing the competitive process.
Woodbury Corp. says it owns and manages more than 180 properties in 15 states including research parks, shopping centers and 19 hotels.
The company’s website does not show any existing properties in Alaska, and its affiliated corporation in the state was created only in December.
Its proposal for the Anchorage airport hotel said the project would likely include a restaurant and bar.
The concept of building a hotel at the airport has been discussed for “some time,” according to Scott McMurren, an Alaska travel expert and columnist.
He described a different concept — more of a “rent a bed” — that came up during the coronavirus pandemic. But neither that project nor any other has been built yet, he said, likely due to developers’ inability to “weave their way in and out of the bureaucracy and fiefdoms regarding airport leases.”
Still, McMurren added, Ashlock is “perhaps better positioned than most to thread that needle.”
“He's a man with connections and imagination,” McMurren said.