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Keep your Meetings at Home
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New campaign
designed to fill short-term gap between the booking cycle for convention
groups and the completion of the convention center headquarters
hotel.
By C.B. Adams
There is little question that development in downtown St. Louis
is showing significant signs of revival. Driving this development
is a spate of new and renovated hotels. Between the hotels that
have recently opened and those that are currently under construction,
downtown St. Louis will offer 7,400 hotel rooms within a mile of
the America’s Center convention complex by early 2003.
“I think downtown is on an upswing,” says Joe Hindsley, general
manager of the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at Union Station. Hindsley
is also president of the St. Louis Area Hotel Association and a
recently appointed board member of the CVC. “One of the key components
to this upswing has been the federal and state historic tax credits
and the development that has resulted from that legislation. Most
of that development has been hotels and mixed-use projects that
include hotels.”
That’s the good news, according to Carole Moody, senior vice president
of marketing for the Convention and Visitors Commission (CVC). When
meeting and convention planners assess a city’s convention capabilities,
they consider the appeal of the city, transportation services, facilities
and, most importantly, hotel rooms.
Since 1997, the St. Louis area—including southwestern Illinois,
St. Charles County, the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County—hotel
inventory has increased by approximately 4,000 rooms.
Joining this increase will be the new convention center headquarters
hotel, the 916-room Renaissance Grand Hotel St. Louis and its sister
facility, the 165-suite Renaissance St. Louis Suites Hotel. The
suites property is a renovation of the former Lenox Hotel and will
open in March 2002. The hotel combines a renovation of the former
Gateway Hotel with a new tower building. It was originally scheduled
to open in July 2002, but was delayed to February 2003.
And therein lies the not-so-good news.
“The 4,000 rooms added to our inventory has, of course, created
a challenge for the St. Louis hospitality industry to maintain hotel
occupancy because we have that many more rooms times 365 days a
year to sell,” Moody says. “And because of the delay in the opening
of the convention center headquarters hotel, we have missed the
booking cycle for a number of the major convention groups that have
come here in late 2002 and early 2003.”
To address the challenge of maintaining a hotel occupancy rate comparable
to the 63.9 percent the industry enjoyed in 2000, the CVC created
the “Keep Your Meetings At Home” campaign. The campaign is directed
to the CEOs of the area’s major corporations, urging them not to
take their meetings elsewhere, but to keep them in St. Louis.
“We lost a couple of years in booking convention business into the
city while the convention center hotel development was stalled.
This new campaign re-deploys our efforts to go after one-hotel meetings.
In doing this, our focus for the short term moves away from association
business and annual convention business, and more resources are
being focused on the corporate market. Obviously, St. Louis has
one of the top 10 rankings in terms of corporate headquarters, so
we are saying to those folks, ‘You dictate company policy. We are
asking you to think about how you can help the city during the next
two years by keeping your meetings at home,’” Hindsley says.
One facet of the campaign is a letter-writing campaign. A letter
from Bob Bedell, president and CEO of the CVC, was sent to 1,000
local CEOs in late summer.
The letter stated in part, “St. Louis’ second largest industry needs
your help. I am asking you, personally, to support our local hospitality
industry by keeping your corporate meetings in St. Louis… Your company’s
meetings are important to us and can make a major difference in
an employee’s paycheck, a business’ P&L and the region’s economy.”
Three other quarterly letters, including a joint letter from St.
Louis Mayor Francis Slay and County Executive Buzz Westfall, are
also being planned. In addition, the several area hotels will individually
contact a selected number of the top 250 area corporations to determine
the potential for holding meetings at their properties. St. Louis
Commerce Magazine and the RCGA have joined in support of the
campaign with this article.
Although the campaign is still in the early stages, Hindsley says
there has already been some positive reaction from St. Louis’ business
leaders.
“There is a real interest among the business community in this campaign.
2002 and 2003 will be difficult years for St. Louis hotels—and related
businesses such as retail and restaurants—because of the increased
inventory, but 2004 and beyond will be very positive. That is why
the business community has responded by considering how they can
redirect their meetings to St. Louis for the next couple of years,”
he says.
C. B. Adams is a St. Louis-based writer, communications consultant
and adjunct faculty member at University of Missouri–St. Louis.
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