‘It is miraculous’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/12/2017 (3078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In May 2016, just a couple of months after the opening of the major expansion to the RBC Convention Centre, the Liberal Party of Canada held its biennial convention there with about 2,600 delegates.

At the same time that Justin Trudeau and his liberal-red colleagues were flooding into downtown Winnipeg, the international business conference Centrallia also was taking place in the convention centre, with about 700 delegates of its own.

Prior to the $180-million expansion and its additional 112,000 square feet of leaseable space, the convention centre staff and colleagues at Tourism Winnipeg couldn’t even pretend to bid on conventions with more than 800 delegates.

Before the expansion, the Home Expressions Show would take over the whole building, effectively putting it out of commission.

After a year and a half of being able to claim bragging rights to having the fourth-largest convention centre in the country, it looks like the facility is doing what it is supposed to do — bringing in more meeting and convention delegates and their fat expense accounts.

Klaus Lahr, the longtime president and CEO of the RBC Convention Centre Winnipeg, is chuffed with the early success.

Lahr said in 2016, including only nine months with the new addition, the new convention centre generated a level of business activity that was not expected to be reached for six years.

“In my opinion it is miraculous,” he said.

A whole world of opportunities has opened up. While some would like to see more national and international convention delegates flooding the downtown, solid early growth has been achieved.

Lahr’s data show that not only did convention centre activity cause more than a 50 per cent increase in hotel room nights — from an annual average of about 90,000 before the expansion to 145,449 in 2016 — but it also achieved the highest occupancy rate of the 17 convention centres in the country that year, as ranked by HLT Advisory. (The Free Press was not able to be confirm that number.)

“We are extremely pleased with that spin-off factor to the hotel community,” he said.

Lahr said the significant public investment from the three levels of government — which did not come without a lot of hand-wringing and horse-trading — had to be made and that if it wasn’t, experts warned him, business could slip by as much as 25 per cent as other communities beefed up their competitive offerings.

The timing of the development was calculated to leverage other recent public investments, such as the new Richardson International Airport terminal, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights and Investors Group Field, in order to give national and international meetings and convention planners a new reason to come to Winnipeg.

The additional space includes a third-floor vista that features a view of the Golden Boy to the west and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to the east.

It has allowed the meeting and convention sales team to pitch to 400 additional national and international organizations that the smaller size of the former facility precluded the city from bidding on.

“We are in the conversation now,” said Dayna Spiring, the CEO of Economic Development Winnipeg which operates Tourism Winnipeg.

Just building the facility was not enough, she noted.

“We can have a beautiful convention centre but if people can’t get their head around coming to Winnipeg the convention centre is relatively useless.”

The convention centre had a $62.65-million effect on the city’s economy in 2016 — that included payroll to close to 900 employees, fees to suppliers, taxes and delegate spending. But from Spiring’s point of view, that is just one piece in an integrated plan to get people thinking differently about Winnipeg.

“We can’t be the city of potholes and mosquitoes,” she said.

‘We can have a beautiful convention centre but if people can’t get their head around coming to Winnipeg the convention centre is relatively useless’– Dayna Spiring,CEO of Economic Development Winnipeg 

Lots of progress has been made over the past decade in that regard, but she said they can do better: from a tourism development point of view, the city needs to home in on what the focus should be.

“We don’t have unlimited resources and we need to figure out where the biggest bang for our buck is — and (the category of) meetings and conventions is where I will put my money every time,” she said.

“Those delegates spend four times what average leisure travellers will spend.”

That’s one of the reasons why the hotel industry is so happy the city is proposing to allocate 25 per cent of the accommodation tax that’s collected by Winnipeg hoteliers to support attracting special events to Winnipeg. That’s what was intended when it began in 2007, before budgetary imperatives forced the government of the day to redirect those funds.

“Attracting major events is critical to the success of the hotel industry and when our industry thrives, so do other parts of the local economy,” said Scott Jocelyn, president and CEO of the Manitoba Hotel Association.

Given that downtown hotels find themselves in competition with the convention centre when it comes to booking local and regional events, Jocelyn is not quite prepared to declare victory.

He will not acknowledge his members are busier because of the convention centre addition.

“When there are national and international events at the convention centre, we get excited,” he said. “But if those events aren’t coming and the convention centre has to rely on more local business, that is not good for us.”

It’s the nature of the beast that the hotel industry is less than impressed when the convention centre fills its rooms during the festive season with Christmas events booked by local companies and organizations — because hotels also are competing for these bookings.

Jocelyn also wondered if it might not have been a strategic mistake to have waited so long to build the Sutton Place Hotel adjacent to the north side of the hotel, a project that is not scheduled to be completed until 2021.

“I hope that hotel gets built so that we can remove any reason for people not to come to Winnipeg,” Jocelyn said. “We have a great convention centre now. Maybe it would have been better to get the hotel built first. That didn’t happen. When there are national and international events (at the convention centre) we are busier.”

Lahr and Spiring are confident that’s coming. Lahr said 2016 results did not just reflect a honeymoon. He said 2017 is tracking close to 10 per cent better than last year and Spiring is convinced that momentum is just building.

“When we go to national associations now they have heard of Winnipeg for the Heritage Classic, the Grey Cup, different things we have done and the different attractions that are here,” she said. “It will continue to grow. We made the investment and we’re not going to stop.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca