Gaylord's Expanded Plan Nixed

On May 8, at a Port of San Diego board of port commissioners meeting, Gaylord Entertainment unveiled plans for a 550,000 square foot convention center for the Chula Vista, Calif., bayfront.

The problem was, during several previous public meetings, nobody ever mentioned that the proposed center had grown from the announced 400,000 sq. ft., making it more competitive with another facility to the north that also sits on the port's land — the San Diego Convention Center.

The port commission voted unanimously to make Gaylord stick with the original size.

"The achitect said the increase in space had to do with an increase in hotel rooms," said Marguerite Elicone, spokeswoman for the Port of San Diego. "We didn't accept the conceptual design (with the expanded plans). We told (Gaylord) they had to change the convention center back to the original size and resubmit."

A letter of intent between Gaylord and the port commission is still in place, and Gaylord has six months to negotiate, Elicone added.

She said that was the first mention of a bigger center. "I'm not sure what went wrong, whether it was a miscommunication or not," she added.

Gaylord Entertaiment did not return calls for comment.

Needless to say, operators of the San Diego Convention Center, which has 615,000 sq. ft. of exhibit space, weren't thrilled when they heard about Gaylord's revised proposal.

"It's our belief that the building, even at 400,000 sq. ft., would have an impact on us," said Steven Johnson, vice president of public affairs for the San Diego Convention Center Corp. "To everyone's surprise, it would have been a building of 550,000 sq. ft., and that would have allowed it to compete with us even more."

Gaylord's project could cost up to $1 billion, a small portion of which will be covered by the Port of San Diego and the city of Chula Vista. Johnson said the Port Commission's refusal to accept the new plans made sense because it was already involved with San Diego's center. Allowing Gaylord to build a comparable facility in Chula Vista would be like "robbing Peter to pay Paul," in his view.

Two years earlier, when Gaylord was one of the bidders on the proposed project, Johnson said his team was concerned that Gaylord's hotel-convention center model would lure shows away from the SDCC. Now that Gaylord's plans are close to being finalized, that concern hasn't diminished.

"Gaylord does packages to rotate shows between their locations, and now Chula Vista will be in that rotation," Johnson added. "It spreads costs over different properties."

John Kaatz, a partner in facility market analysis firm Conventions, Sports & Leisure Intl., didn't think the SDCC had anything to worry about. First of all, he said, the Chula Vista convention center would still be half the size of San Diego's.

He added, "By and large, Gaylord's model has been to have enough space to have multiple events occurring at the same time to level off the hotel-night generation."

In other words, Gaylord doesn't typically book big events that take up an entire center and require long move-in and move-out times, because that would cause the company to lose hotel night stays. On the other hand, the SDCC isn't connected to a particular hotel and has exhibit space to handle significantly larger shows.

Nashville-based Gaylord Entertainment chose Chula Vista as a West Coast location to join its four other hotel-convention centers: Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn.; Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Kissimmee, Fla.; Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas; and Gaylord Natl. Resort & Convention Center in Prince George's County, Md.

Phillip Jones, president and CEO of the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau, said having Gaylord's Grapevine facility one county away from the Dallas Convention Center has been a "mixed blessing."

"It's clearly taken away some smaller events," he said. "But on the flip side, other groups that didn't want to be in an enclosed facility and preferred a more urban environment chose the Dallas Convention Center."

For now, the Dallas CVB doesn't market Gaylord, but Jones said the bureau was in talks with Gaylord about doing so in the future.

"They are very succesful at what they do, and we could leverage that," he said.

The planned Chula Vista complex includes a proposed 1,500-room hotel, 8,000 sq. ft. of retail space and is expected to be completed by 2010.