Walking into the small room next to the Renaissance Providence Hotel’s front desk, the first things you see are locally designed Providence T-shirts and a small wall displaying local artwork for sale.
Turn a corner and you see shelves of free restaurant guides, maps and pamphlets for the city’s attractions. These things are not uncommon to hotel lobbies across the nation. But the ArtTix terminal, which faces the materials, is something new.
It’s new for a Providence hotel, anyway.
The terminal is a computer and printer that link guests directly to the ArtTix Web site, where they can search for and purchase tickets for Festival Ballet Providence productions, movies at the Feinstein IMAX Theater, Opera Providence performances, FirstWorks events, and plays at Trinity Repertory Company, the Perishable Theater and the Gamm Theater, among others. They also can search for free events in the city such as Gallery Night and WaterFire.
It provides an added amenity for guests, said Kimberly Greene, assistant general manager at the hotel. And it shows how far the Renaissance Providence is willing to go to in positioning itself as an arts-focused hotel.
Peter Bramante, executive director of the Arts & Business Council of Rhode Island, said the hotel’s general manager, Angelo De Peri, and the hotel’s director of marketing and communications, Tom Riel, approached him about opening the satellite ArtTix terminal.
The pair had been perusing art galleries downtown, thinking they would turn the existing bit of space into a gallery, Bramante said. When they walked by the council’s new office at 10 Dorrance St. and saw the ArtTix visitors center, they changed their tune.
“Our target market really enjoys the uniqueness of a place,” Greene said, adding that guests want an experience that is authentic. “[ArtTix] is one more connection for our guests to the local arts scene.”
It also has positive implications for the industry as a whole, Bramante said.
Setting up the satellite ArtTix terminal/visitor’s center awakened new ideas at the Arts & Business Council about how to improve the ArtTix software platform and make it more inclusive of other amenities in the city.
One idea is to create a profile for each hotel guest who purchases tickets, Bramante said. The profiles would be accessible to hotel staff. There could be a way to flag guests so that every time the guest checked in, the staff would be notified that the guest previously had purchased tickets using ArtTix.
Hotel staff could then ask if the guest would like to see a new play at Trinity Rep, as he or she had previously.
Another idea is to add features such as menus of local restaurants and a method to make online reservations, Bramante said. The council will look into adding downloadable historic walking tours in partnership with the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Bramante said the Arts & Business Council is excited about a task force convened by Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline that will study visitors to the city’s arts and cultural attractions to determine who they are, what their behaviors are and how the city’s arts and cultural organizations can improve their marketing to them.
The task force was spurred by an Americans for the Arts study released in May, he said. The study determined that audiences spent about $71 million at Providence arts and cultural venues in 2005. And that was just in ticket sales, not including dinner or shopping.
“We know we have an economic impact,” Bramante said. “But nobody really knows who those customers are in terms of their behavior.”
The team at the Renaissance Providence Hotel is eager to see the study’s results, because it shares a clientele with many of the arts and cultural venues in the city.
“The hotel benefits from those day trips that turn into an overnight stay,” Greene said. And the city, she added, benefits from the hotel’s marketing to national and international guests who visit the city because they are loyal to the Renaissance brand. •
