Morgan’s Wonderland is a one-of-a-kind amusement park in San Antonio. Open since 2010, the park is full of rides, playgrounds and splash pads that are all designed to accommodate people with disabilities. More than 3 million people have visited the park, and the company has expanded to offer summer camps, accessible sports leagues and soon, a state-of-the-art hotel.
Morgan’s Hotel is set to open near the park in 2026 and plans to offer lodging that will meet the needs of all of its visitors. Gordon Hartman, the founder of Morgan’s Wonderland, spoke to the Texas Standard about the new project.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us about some of the ways that Morgan’s Hotel will be different from others out there.
Gordon Hartman: This has been something we’ve been thinking about for the past year and a half or so, but really got quite aggressive on it about a year ago and made a decision that there really is a need for a place where those who have special needs, that when they go traveling and looking for lodging, that whatever their needs may be, they can be accommodated.
Now, this hotel will look like any other hotel, but there will be key components to it that make sure that no matter if someone has cognitive delay, physical special needs, visual impairment, hearing impairment, whatever the case may be, that we can accommodate them.
And if it’s not in the room then when they would register to come to the hotel, they would give us a list of things they do need, and those things would be in the room that would help accommodate them as well. And that’s why it’s an ultra accommodating hotel.
It’s something that many people have asked, similar when we built Morgan’s Wonderland 15 years ago, why hasn’t that’s been done before? I can’t answer that question other than to say that the time is now for something like this. And we’re very glad that we’re moving forward with this in a very aggressive fashion.
Will every room in the hotel offer all of these amenities? I’ve been to some hotels where it’s like, “oh, we’ve set aside a few rooms for, you know, people with these certain needs.”
Yeah. And the reason I kind of smile when you say that is because let me give you a real quick statistic: There’s about 49,000 rooms in San Antonio; use this as a baseline. Now of those, if you take the population of the special needs community in general, all the way from mild to acute, you would have about 6,000 people who would need an ADA room, technically.
The problem is there’s only enough ADA rooms out of those 50,000 to accommodate 28% of those people. And that’s part of the problem. And we’re not just talking about people who have special needs, but we’re also talking about a population that’s getting older, that’s needing more space, that needs to have accommodations of people and walkers and things like that.
In talking with people and listening to them, we learned so much about little things that we can do – small, little, tiny adjustments to allow for people to have a much better opportunity. Things that every hotel ought to have. And so no room will be not accommodating.
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Do you have hopes or do you have maybe some evidence that other hotel chains are paying attention to what you’re doing here, that they might be willing to learn and take from your example?
Well, here’s the amazing thing about this. When I started on this about a year ago, one of the first things I did is I reached out to the CEO of three different companies based on just our review of who we wanted to try to see if they were interested in this concept: the CEO of Marriott, the CEO of Hilton and the CEO of Hyatt.
And I went to them and I said, this is a concept that we have, and I can tell you that the interest among all three has been absolutely incredible. What we have done is we wrote about a 60-page book about how to go about this, or what we want to do and what it needs to do.
We submitted that to 21 different executives, and they all now are working with us to determine who is going to be the company that’s going to join us, whether it be Marriott, Hyatt or Hilton. So I can tell you, the excitement is there.
So what’s next? You plan to open in 2026. What do you want people to know about where you’re at now and maybe what you need from them in the meantime, or what they can be doing when they visit a hotel, wherever they are?
We’ll start breaking ground in about three months on the infrastructure of the site that we have, which is located only about a half a mile from Morgan’s Wonderland. Now, Morgan’s Wonderland and Morgan’s Hotel will not be one and only. There will be many more.
The plan of this is that this will ultimately be a brand within one of these organizations. And so you’ll start to see Morgan’s Hotels in other locations. And I can tell you, we will be announcing quite soon, another ultra accessible park in about a couple of weeks. They also plan to build a Morgan’s Hotel next to it.
So this is the beginning of something that I think is going to start opening the eyes of saying, let’s do some small changes. Nothing massive, nothing that’s going to make everything look different. This is something that is well past due.
And, you know, when we opened up Morgan’s Wonderland, we often wondered, is anybody going to show up? Is this going to work? And the answer has well far exceeded our expectations. I think this is the same thing that’s going to happen here.
And I think you’re going to see the replication of this. I think you’re going to see many of the ideas that we put in place into this hotel are going to be replicated in other hotels going forward, because when you talk about 69 million people just in the United States alone – I’m not talking to worldwide – who have some special need, they’re looking for a place like this, but they’re not being accommodated.
You know, the first hotel was built in 705, and the first one in the United States was built about 250 years ago in New York City. But there’s never been one that’s ultra accommodating like the one we’re going to build. So hang on, there’s a lot more to come.
