Visit Austin offers look at strategy to support hotels during convention center closure

Staff from Visit Austin plan to aggressively market the city to new and recurring visitors in the coming years as part of a three-part strategy to support the local hotel and convention industry during the four-year closure of the Austin Convention Center.

Last week, the Tourism Commission received a presentation from the tourism organization, which is tasked with building business for the more than 15,000 hotel rooms downtown that will be directly impacted by the convention center project beginning next year.

The strategy includes widespread communication of the other meeting and presentation space available outside of the convention center, including assorted hotel meeting spaces and at facilities like the Palmer Events Center and Austin City Limits Live. Visit Austin also plans to prioritize bookings for sports business with potential to turn into annual business that will remain once the convention center reopens in 2030.

Adopting a “campus-style” approach, Visit Austin plans to spread large bookings around to clusters of downtown hotels and attempt to layer different events into the same groups of hotels, with the goal of achieving the density needed in multiple locations to keep nightly room rates steady. That tactic is intended to prevent hotels from needing to offer significant discounts to attract smaller amounts of business from individual tourists.

“If we start doing that for our four big-box hotels downtown – we do it around the Hyatt, we do it around the Renaissance and some of our bigger hotels – they can use other hotels as overflow,” said Tom Noonan, Visit Austin’s president and CEO. “We’re not out of the convention business. We’re just out of the convention business for the center for those years.”

In response to a commission question about the goal of adding more nights to business guests’ stays, Noonan said the increased marketing of the city’s music, culinary and recreation offerings will play a major component.

“You want to book a convention here because they become tourists. … If you’re a nurse here for the nursing convention, you’re gonna turn a couple more days into vacation time,” he said. “You’ll see this data where they’re going to and from the hotel, the convention center, the first three or four days, and then the next three days, they’re going all around the city, going to music venues and parks and all that kinda stuff. We know that you get kind of a twofer with conventioneers.”

Noonan shared that the Austin Visitor Center, which is located on Fourth Street and will be disrupted by the convention center’s reconstruction, will move to a new location on Fifth Street just east of Congress Avenue in February. Visit Austin plans to sign a lease this week for the Phillips Building property, a late-19th-century location of approximately 7,500 square feet that originally served as a dealership for Studebaker automobiles.

Noonan also gave an update on the process of securing signatures from local hoteliers needed to approve the Tourism Public Improvement District, which has received initial approval from City Council and will provide funding to help increase marketing efforts for hotels during the convention center’s closure. He said there are still two or three of the major downtown hotels that need to sign the agreement for the 2 percent tax on room nights, which will also provide some funding for assistance services for the city’s homeless population.

Noonan estimated the agreement will be completed with all the necessary signatures by early May, which will allow for the needed funds to be in place for the start of the city’s next budget in October.

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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Posted In: Austin, District 9