Despite the economic downturn, the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau is expecting 2008 to bring in more conventions and more hotel-room bookings than last year.
This fall, 1,200 visitors from around the country will come to Providence to discuss restoring America’s estuaries. Another 2,000 will come to hear about emerging trends in microelectronics. And together, those two conventions are expected to have a direct spending impact of about $4 million on Rhode Island’s economy.
“That’s not just hotel room fees or restaurants, but it’s also transportation and other direct spending – it really trickles down,” said Kristen Adamo, PWCVB vice president of marketing and communications. “It’s an estimate of everything a meeting planner might spend money on when they’re planning an event.”
Those two events – the National Conference on Coastal and Estuarine Habitat Restoration in October and The International Microelectronics and Packaging Society symposium in November – are just two of this fall’s scheduled conventions at the R.I. Convention Center. For 2008, 24 conventions – defined by PWCVB as meetings with 400 or more hotel rooms booked – will take place in Rhode Island during the year. Of those, seven are still to come, said PWCVB President and CEO Martha Sheridan.
Those 24 conventions are a 41-percent jump from the 17 that were hosted in Rhode Island in 2007. And the year before, 20 groups held conventions in Rhode Island. Those numbers don’t include “meetings,” which have less hotel bookings and aren’t as easily tracked, Sheridan said.
But the hotel-room bookings for those conventions might be a better indicator of the state of conventions in Rhode Island, she said. Since 2006, the number of rooms booked for those conferences has jumped about 28 percent, from 36,000 to a projected 46,000 this year. During 2007, when the number of conventions dipped from 20 to 17, the number of room nights booked rose by 3,000.
And heading into this fall, the estimates are that 2008 will finish strong, Adamo said.
Pre-event hotel-room bookings have seen a 19.35 percent rise over last year for the four-month period between September and December, according to PWCVB statistics. That rise in fall traffic, from 32,391 last year to 38,658 this year, is because of a sharp rise in November projections for this year. During that month, it’s expected that 13,645 hotel stays will occur – a 167.6 percent jump over the 5,099 hotel stays during November 2007.
And there are still 1,875 tentative room bookings, Adamo said.
It’s difficult for hospitality experts to explain exactly why Providence has drawn more conventions this year.
“But I will tell you that this year is the first full year that we are operating with the new rooms on the market that went online last summer,” Sheridan said. “Last summer the Renaissance Providence opened in early June and the Westin added 200 rooms in August of last summer. So that, in essence, increased the total number of rooms that we had to sell for 2008.”
While those extra rooms could have been a selling point for some groups, others book their events far in advance – in some cases as far back as five years, Adamo said. In this size market, booking two years ahead is common, Sheridan added.
And although there are some groups that are booked in Rhode Island as far out as 2013, it’s still too early to make predictions for future years, Sheridan said. “That’s because we still have a lot of groups who haven’t yet signed contracts with us, even though they have indicated to our sales managers that they would like to hold their conference here. We can’t confirm a group to ‘definite’ status until we have a signed letter of intent or a signed contract.”
For that reason, many of the conventions that are being held this year were booked in advance of the current economic downturn, Sheridan said.
“The economy is obviously having an impact on every aspect of the market here in Rhode Island and travel is certainly not immune to being impacted by the downturn nationally and regionally,” she said.
She added that she’s hoping the projected number of convention attendees actually show up this fall. Air-travel prices are rising “and also, some corporations have certainly trimmed their travel budgets,” she said. In years past, a firm might have sent five delegates to a convention, but in this type of economy, that might be trimmed to only one or two.
“Or it might affect the number of nights that they stay,” she said. “And that would affect the total rooms booked and the economic impact from those conventions.” •
