Convention center eyes ‘campus-style’ events schedule during closure for expansion

Leaders from the Austin Convention Center plan to take a campus-style approach to coordinating a greatly scaled back calendar of meeting and event business at downtown hotels during the four to five years the facility is closed for a substantial reconstruction expected to cost more than $1 billion.

Staff from the convention center spoke with the Tourism Commission at its meeting earlier this month, answering a number of lingering questions about the expansion and general recovery of local convention and event business after the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of the discussion, convention center Director Trisha Tatro said the center’s 300 staff members would be allocated throughout other city departments during the reconstruction and brought back when the center reopens for full business.

Tatro said even with planned and recently completed expansions of meeting areas at assorted downtown hotels, the closure of the convention center for multiple years will result in a dramatic reduction for meetings and events that tend to fill midweek bookings for those hotels.

“Even with the new exhibit halls and such, there are so many events that are too large that the hotels cannot take, so some of the smaller events that we’ll be able to accommodate and we’ve already had conversations about that. The ones that were already on the books for the years of construction we’ll be working to rebook them on a kind of first-come, first-served basis in the new center when we reopen,” she said. “We plan on using other city facilities and large venues as we work through this process. We do have the Palmer Events Center and exhibit halls there and we will be working just as Dallas and other convention centers are undergoing renovations and closing portions of their facilities.”

Currently the expansion process is on hold while Austin Convention Center Enterprises works to renegotiate some of the terms of bond debt related to the Hilton Austin hotel to avoid a default trigger caused by the closure of the convention center during the reconstruction. Tatro said that process is expected to conclude this spring, after which the city could release the request for qualifications for the design and engineering work.

The commission also considered and rejected a resolution that would have mostly mirrored action taken by the Downtown Commission last year that asked the city to do more analysis of the national convention economy and performance of the Austin Convention Center before moving ahead with the expansion process.

Commissioners Bill Bunch and John Riedie argued that the years of underperformance compared to analyst projections means the city would likely be tying up hundreds of millions of Hotel Occupancy Tax dollars for decades to fund an expansion they said is unlikely to make a substantial impact on bringing more visitors to the city.

“In my view the (hotel) tax has been skyrocketing in this town because of the cultural cachet of live music, unique local restaurants, Lady Bird Lake and Barton Springs. What’s proven to succeed is investing in live music, cultural and nature tourism, and what’s proven for the last 30 years to fail is investing in convention centers,” Bunch said.

“We could expand this convention center five times and it would not move the needle a fraction on how many people come to Austin and rent hotel rooms, whereas if we actually invested in music, theater and the arts, historic preservation and nature, that is where we’re going to succeed with putting heads in beds.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by donations from the community. Though our reporting covers donors from time to time, we are careful to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A complete list of donors is available here, and our code of ethics is explained here.

Posted In: Music & Entertainment, District 9