Rachel Wimberly

Anchor Hotels: A Big Misunderstanding

As many cities have found out, there’s often a huge gap of understanding when it comes to the value of investing public funds in a convention center.

Most convention centers run at a loss, but the trade-off is the millions of dollars in economic impact brought in by meetings and tradeshows that would have skipped town altogether without the proper venue.

It takes a lot of convincing before most centers eventually get built, so imagine trying to explain to the public, who likely wasn’t happy to fund the center anyway, that now they also need to pony up some cash for a hotel next to it.

As Jeff Blosser, director of Portland’s Oregon Convention Center, told me as I prepared for a story that will appear in the Oct. 5 issue on centers that have had their hotel dreams dashed, “For the most part, the private sector stopped building hotels a while back, unless you had Mickey ears or were in Las Vegas, and now we rely on public funding.”

But, with the economic downturn looking like it isn’t going to go away any time soon, the public is less willing than ever to even consider what the positive impact a hotel may have.

Portland’s hotel plans have been 20 years in the making, and, recently, they were postponed again because the city decided it just couldn’t take the investment risk in the current climate. Who knows when they’ll actually get those plans in the works again?

Another city recently that “got it” and voted for a new convention center hotel was Dallas. It took a lot of hard work on behalf of city officials, as well as tradeshow and meeting professionals, but they got the message across to voters that it was vital that Dallas get a hotel near the Dallas Convention Center or it would continue to lose lucrative business.

Now, if only a few more cities would follow suit.

Posted by Rachel Wimberly on September 25, 2009 | Comments (2)