Pensacola Beach Margaritaville was the first hotel
Pensacola Beach Margaritaville was the first hotel
Not surprisingly, much of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville branding was in Florida. The first Margaritaville restaurant opened at the Universal CityWalk in Orlando in 1999, and Pensacola Beach was home to Jimmy Buffett’s first licensed hotel.
“Having grown up in Mobile, Pensacola Beach was the first Florida I ever saw, long before I headed to Key West,” Buffett said when the hotel opened. “It is great to be coming home and making a commitment to Pensacola and the Gulf Coast, especially at this time.”
At a cost of $50 million, Margaritaville Pensacola Beach oceanfront hotel opened in a prime location in the middle of the island’s commercial district on an 800 ft. parcel in June of 2010 on the former site of a Holiday Inn destroyed by Hurricane Ivan on September 16, 2004. The hotel site includes over 800 feet of gulf-front property and an additional 800 feet that overlooks the bay.
The LandShark Landing Beach Bar is now the Salty Rose, but the hotel’s center of attraction will always be the 1,000 ft. of quartz white sand just outside the back door.
Promising “barefoot elegance,” the Pensacola Beach hotel kicked off the run of Margaritaville luxury hotels to which Buffett sold intellectual property. Not all have flourished.
“Anytime your franchise agreement is coming up, you have a decision to make about the next chapter for your property,” said hotel co-owner Leigh Taylor.
“We’re very proud of our history with Margaritaville. We were the first hotel in that brand and we have had a great relationship with them,” she added.
The first Margaritaville Casino opened in the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas a year later, in 2011.
The company’s flagship Margaritaville Hollywood Beach Resort opened in 2015 with eight restaurants, 369 rooms and more than 30,000 square feet of event space.
The Island H2O Live! Water park sprang up in 2019 along with Margaritaville Resort Orlando in Kissimmee.
In 2017, Buffett announced his first retirement community, Latitude Margaritaville, which opened in Daytona Beach. It’s limited to residents aged “55 and better.”
In 2021, the world’s first Margaritaville-branded cruise ship, Margaritaville Paradise, launched from the Port of Palm Beach.