The Toyota Music Factory Pavilion. Credit: Visit Irving Texas.

While Irving, Texas, has long been a popular meeting and business destination for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, new entertainment features that attract primarily recreational visitors have added a special twist to its non-transient traffic.

This transformation into a recreational magnet is bolstered by the arrival on the market of a new ultra-luxury Ritz-Carlton hotel that further raises the profile of a destination that has enjoyed an impressive roster of Fortune 500 corporations living, working and playing in its master-planned community of Las Colinas.

“The city was well built for citizens and businesses. From a functional standpoint, especially for business travel, it’s worked very well,” said Maura Gast, executive director of Visit Irving, Texas. “But the challenge we had was the question of ‘what can we do when we’re done for the day,’ and now we have those pieces. Our hotels have those rooms. Now, the conference center has those pieces.

Today, Irving is stealing the music show from the Dallas and Fort Worth domain with superstars, world-renowned headliners, local bands and regional artists taking the bar at this Metroplex hot spot, with high-end venues like the Toyota Music Factory and its Live Nation Pavilion topping the charts.

[Related: How Irving, Texas, Became a Magnet for Hobbies]

Located in the Toyota Music Factory entertainment district, the Live Nation Pavilion seats 4,000 people indoors and 4,000 on the lawn, with huge roll-up doors for airplane hangars that open onto the lawn seats.

The venue offers a total of 100,000 feet of area for personal events and has the difference of being one of the few convertible concert halls in the United States that has the ability to go from an air-conditioned indoor environment to an indoor/outdoor amphitheater at the touch of a button.

The venue’s Toyota VIP Lounge seats up to 50 more people and has an expansive lobby that planners can use for artistic activations. The 40-acre site on which it sits also includes the Irving Convention Center and the Westin Irving Convention Center.

Toyota Music Factory Located in the Pavilion, Toyota Music Factory has dozens of restaurants and bars, plus what’s described as the “best honkytonk,” Mama Tried. Now owned by Brookfield Asset Management, the district is expected to house $6 million in innovations slated for final touches in October.

One of the highlights of the Toyota Music Factory is the Texas Lottery Plaza, an open-air level surrounded by a number of restaurants, which will also be part of the renovation.

The Rayleigh Underground This stunning new two-story Toyota Music Factory, aptly named, is located beneath the lawn of the Pavilion’s amphitheater and offers an “underground theater with dinner” atmosphere with indoor and outdoor restaurants and five bars. To date, for the 21st century, the 38,000-square-foot Rayleigh Underground is an audio-visual spectacle with an 18-by-50-foot level that features a 36-foot video wall and multiple interactive LED screens.

Smaller Places to Catch Rising Stars

To catch up with emerging talent, teams can take advantage of Irving venues such as the courtyard of the OUTLAW Taproom at the Ritz-Carlton Dallas in Las Colinas; Two Mules Cantina on Texican Court, which serves Tex-Mex favorites a short walk from the conference center and has a beer garden; or the intimate scene of the Ranch in Las Colinas.

[Related: Irving Packs Texas into a Compact Package]

Irving’s hotel events include the Ritz-Carlton Dallas, Las Colinas, which this year took over the former Four Seasons on 400 acres of prime land in Las Colinas and offers 431 guest rooms and approximately 80,000 square feet of meeting and event space.

The new hotels entering in 2023 are the Element Dallas Las Colinas, with 157 rooms and 2,277 square feet of meeting space, and the Embassy Suites through Hilton Irving Las Colinas, with 168 rooms, 4 meeting rooms and 3,702 square feet of space. The Westin Irving Convention Center at the Las Colinas venue opened in 2019 with 350 rooms and 47,500 square feet of space.

Located in the center of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan complex, with easy access to DFW International Airport (nine miles) and Dallas Love Field (8. 5 miles), Irving is a three-and-a-half-hour flight from each. major metropolitan domain in the U. S. , Canada, and Mexico.

Visit Irving Texas

This article was produced in partnership with Visit Irving Texas.

Tyler Davidson has been covering the industry for about 30 years. In his current role at Meetings Today, Tyler leads the editorial team on their project to deliver the most productive assembly content in the industry.