Los Angeles convention business thrives: Convention Center expansion aids surge in bookings.

Los Angeles convention business thrives

The Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau in March had its best month ever for booking major downtown conventions and has started to reverse a years-long decline in the city's meetings business, agency officials said.

According to Michael Collins, vice president of public affairs, the bureau last month booked seven major conventions into the downtown Convention Center, by far the highest monthly total since the agency started selling the facility as a meetings site in 1983.

He said when the current fiscal year began on July 1, 1990, 11 conventions were slated for the center. Since that date, when the bureau's new administration began its first full fiscal year of selling the facility, 20 major conventions have been booked for the coming years, said Collins.

The economic impact can be measured in terms of hotel room nights booked for the meetings. (A hotel room night equals one room occupied for one night.)

Collins said that by June 30, the new business will have generated a potential 300,000 room nights, which at $100 a night per room translates into $30 million more in business for downtown hotels. That excludes spending on restaurants and taxis.

By comparison, Collins said, the conventions booked as of last July 1 would have produced about 80,000 room nights at downtown hotels.

All the new business is for years following completion of the Convention Center expansion, sometime in mid-1993. The center is being doubled in size.

"I think we are on a roll and the key to it has been the expansion of the Convention Center and the new team at the bureau," said John Argue, a Los Angeles attorney on the board of directors of the bureau, a quasi-public agency that gets its funding through membership fees and the city's 12.5 percent hotel bed tax.

He said the only flaw blurring convention prospects is that the downtown facility still lacks an adjacent hotel. A major Convention Center hotel has been planned since 1987 but has been delayed mostly for financial reasons.

Collins said the bureau has not planned for an adjacent hotel until 1997. "Right now the lack of a hotel hasn't hurt us but if it isn't built, it could," he said.

Bruce Baltin, a hotel and travel industry analyst in the Los Angeles office of the Pannell Kerr Forster accounting firm, said, "The figures show a promising step, a step in the right direction for the city's convention business. But there is still a long way to go in turning it around."

In recent years, Los Angeles has been losing major convention business to smaller cities because of what tourism and city officials said were the limited size and outdated facilities at the Convention Center.

As a result, downtown hotels' occupancy rate has been steadily dropping.

Tourism officials in the city also blamed the bureau's former administration for the convention slump, saying it did not aggressively market L.A. as a convention city.

In 1989, the board of directors fired the bureau's president, Bill Miller, and brought in George Kirkland formerly head of the Miami convention bureau. He reportedly got a three-year contract worth $1.2 million, making him the highest paid public employee in Los Angeles County.

Kirkland has made several changes, including cutting the public relations staff and adding sales people, according to Collins, who came from Miami with Kirkland.

Kirkland was traveling last week and unavailable for comment on the bookings.

Collins said that by June 30, when the fiscal year ends, the bureau expects to have booked at least 30 conventions into the expanded downtown center, which is bordered by Figueroa, Pico, 11th Street and the Harbor (110) Freeway.

He said the bureau's goal this year was to book enough conventions to produce 220,000 room nights. "We are easily going to exceed that," Collins said.

The March upturn came amid a recession, the Persian Gulf was and furor over the Rodney King beating by police officers, an incident that received worldwide publicity and sparked some fears it would hurt tourism and convention business.

"The difference has to be the Convention Center. Before, we just couldn't handle the big out-of-town groups. Now we'll be able to," Collins said.

Among conventions booked in March were the California Restaurant Association Western Restaurant Convention and Expo, scheduled for August 1993 with an anticipated attendance of 50,000 (including consumers), producing 13,000 room nights.

Other meetings include the Radio-Television News Directors Association conference and exposition, scheduled for September 1994 with an attendance of 3,000, producing 10,100 room nights, and the annual convention of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The ASCO convention is slated for 1998 with expected attendance of 10,000, for 35,355 room nights.