Exhibition Space: Will There Ever Be Enough?

By Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 5/15/2006

On the wall of a closet in his office atop the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, Las Vegas Sands Chairman Sheldon Adelson has a framed cover from a Life magazine dating back to the 1950s. There's a picture of a row of showgirls and a headline that asks, "How Much Bigger Can Vegas Get?"

Half a century later, with 133,000 hotel rooms and somewhere around 9.5 million square feet of convention and meeting space, people are still asking the same question. And the answer today, according to Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority research, is "A lot bigger."

The LVCVA says more than 2.7 million sq. ft. of additional exhibit and meeting space will become available by 2010, along with 38,000 new rooms. That doesn't include the planned construction and expansions that the authority officially labels tentative. On that list are another 214,000 sq. ft. of exhibit and meeting space and 40,000 more rooms. And on neither list, at this point, is the approximately 1.1 million sq. ft. of exhibit space that the Sands has just confirmed (see related story, p. 1) or any project that Harrah's may have in the works but not yet announced.

All of which perhaps begs the question: When is enough exhibit space in one American city enough? The answer, according to sources contacted by Tradeshow Week, apparently is "Not any time soon."

"We're not there yet," said Reed Exhibitions Senior Vice President Ken McAvoy. "I can't tell you how much is enough."

Apparently, the 482,000 sq. ft. of new exhibit space that became available in Las Vegas last year (according to the 2005 TSW Major Exhibit Hall Directory) wasn't enough.

And, with the 80,000 sq. ft. of space at Boyd Gaming's South Coast Hotel & Casino and the 70,000 sq. ft. of exhibit and meeting space at the Red Rock Casino Resort Spa being this year's only two major additions, 2006 looks to be a relatively quiet period in Las Vegas exhibition industry history.

That will be followed by an expected flurry of activity in 2007 and 2008, with the addition of nearly 1.3 million sq. ft., according to the LVCVA. (In its reports of impending construction activity, the LVCVA does not distinguish between exhibition and meeting space.) Things slow down again in 2009 before Boyd's Echelon Resort & Las Vegas ExpoCenter opens in 2010 with 1 million sq. ft. (about two-thirds exhibit space).

Then there's the estimated 1.1 million sq. ft. at the Sands, some unknown amount of space at Harrah's and all the projects that haven't been announced yet.

OK. Enough? Even then, maybe not.

"The numbers seem inflated when you look at them from one standpoint," said Michael Green, Hanley Wood Exhibitions executive vice president, "but it doesn't relate in an exact way to the usage standpoint."

Hanley Wood had three Las Vegas-based shows on the 2005 Tradeshow Week 200, and organizes countless smaller events in the city.

"But I can't just pick a set of dates at a facility and have any assurance I'll get those dates," Green said.

There is an ebb and flow to the tradeshow season, particularly in a desert city like Las Vegas.

"If I want to get a show in July, it's pretty easy," Green said. "But September through November, or January and February, it's pretty difficult."

In other words, while there are times of the year where those 133,000 hotel rooms and 9.5 million sq. ft. are almost anybody's for the asking, there are other times — like early January when Intl. CES is in town, or early November when multiple shows all related to the aftermarket automotive products sector coincide — when it's not nearly enough.

Still, finding space for the big shows is not Green's main concern.

"We're an acquisition company," he said of Hanley Wood. "We're continually buying products, and some of them aren't rotating through Vegas as often as we want them to."

Of course, Hanley Wood, with its three TSW 200 shows, or Reed Exhibitions, with its six, or the show managers with the other 35 TSW 200 shows in Las Vegas last year have the same reason for wanting dates there.

"People are taking shows to Vegas for one reason," Green said. "It attracts attendees."

That's the kind of reasoning that Boyd Gaming President Bob Bogner understands. Boyd is the force behind Echelon Place, planned for the former Stardust site by 2010. Besides the 1 million sq. ft. of exhibit and meeting space already mentioned, there will be four hotels with 5,300 rooms, almost all of them so-called upscale.

"We believe there's an opportunity to have a significant role in the next evolution of Las Vegas," Bogner said. "Las Vegas is going through a period of upscaling, and that is not lost on the attendee."

As a relative neophyte to the Las Vegas major facility world, Bogner knows Boyd has quite a task ahead of it as it prepares to compete with the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Sands and Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. But he has a plan.

"We're mindful of the challenges with a big ramp-up in supply," he said. "We need to take share from our existing competitors, and we need to grow the market by taking business from other facilities in other cities."

Others agree that even with more exhibit space available in Las Vegas, it won't be the local competitors that suffer. It will be the cities whose shows are moving into that available space.

"I'm sure the other cities don't want to hear this," Green said, "but the industry is not growing as fast as Las Vegas is."