Vegas Asks for Advice on CC Expansion

By Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 9/5/2005

Convention centers all over the country often use advisory boards to help guide their operations, but drawing on its abundant resources, the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority has taken the practice one step further.

Following a feasibility study concluded earlier this year by Convention, Sports & Leisure, the LVCVA board of directors in March approved plans to renovate the Las Vegas Convention Center. With only a slight addition of exhibit space, the project focuses on adding and improving meeting rooms, and circulation within and accessibility to the center.

Since then, the LVCVA has selected a team of architects to develop a project program (overarching design, budget and timeline), but its first task was not necessarily to start sketching concepts.

Rather, project managers Mike Musgrave, vice president of MWH Global, and Don Grinberg, principal of HNTB Architects, were told to go talk to building users.

That message came from Rossi Ralenkotter, LVCVA president and CEO. "As we started this project, he made it very clear that he wanted early customer input into the program," said Musgrave.

So, following a full-building assessment — that included not only "getting into the rafters," as Musgrave put it, but also conducting 27 stakeholder interviews with general contractors, service providers and staff — the project team and LVCVA devised a formal plan to pick show managers' brains.

The result was a series of unprecedented focus groups: eight all-day sessions in Las Vegas, Chicago and Washington, D.C. For the project, the LVCVA sought out its largest and most frequent existing and future users, from associations like the Consumer Electronics Assn., to independent show organizers like Reed Exhibitions, to corporate show organizers like Cisco.

The authority sent participants invitations and questionnaires to get them ruminating ahead of time, then invited them for breakfast, general discussion, existing building critique, lunch, breakout brainstorming sessions and more general discussion. No LVCVA staff participated, so as not to influence the give-and-take.

"I've done this kind of work all over the country for the last 20 years," said Grinberg. "It's typical to reach out to the customers, but not to this depth and scope and quantity ... I think we've raised the bar on how this process should and can work."

Chris Brown, vice president of meetings and conventions for the Natl. Assn. of Broadcasters, was one focus group participant. Among the LVCC's biggest customers, NAB spanned 822,000 net square feet earlier this year and brought 1,385 exhibitors and 56,298 professional attendees to Las Vegas. The show is booked in the city through at least 2010.

Brown described the process as interesting and fruitful. Although he said each show organizer had a particular agenda, the group he was in found common ground on several points.

Improving traffic flow to and within the LVCC's South Hall was a concern of many, Brown said. "It's very inefficient, both from a strategic and operational perspective — laying out a floor and driving traffic evenly through that long space."

The configuration of the 1.3 million sq. ft. South Hall building, added in 2002, is the source of frequent complaints among Las Vegas show organizers, exhibitors and attendees. That expansion was driven by large customers' urgent need for more room to grow and overseen by convention center and authority staff at the time.

That won't happen again. Said Musgrave, "Usually, it's 'Hurry up and go build something.' The LVCVA is saying, 'Let's take our time and do this right.'"

Other concerns frequently mentioned in the focus groups were the fear that the renovation would disrupt shows in the building during construction and, consistent with CSL's original findings, a need for more meeting rooms.

"The other thing we kept pushing them on was thinking about the comfort factor," said Brown. "It's a massive facility, and they have to find ways to relieve some of the physical strain of getting around it — be it people movers, moving sidewalks, rest areas."

If one thing could be added to the process, Brown noted, it would be more input from exhibitors. "We encouraged our advisory boards to give us feedback that we could pass along, but it would be better if (the LVCVA) went directly to them. Those companies do 50 or 60 shows a year. If the LVCC can keep them happy, they can keep us happy."