was demonstrably smaller than the 601,000 attendees the GWCC had accommodated in 1989. A modest increase brought attendance almost back to the 2009 level, at 539,680.
Other major destination cities also saw dramatic declines in convention center business. New York City’s Javits Center saw its convention and tradeshow attendance fall from 817,100 in 2007 to 708,200 the following year and 633,600 in 2009. The hotel room nights produced by the Walter Washington Convention Center in the nation’s capital fell from 376,296 in fiscal year 2008 to 280,478 in fiscal 2009. The room-night total dropped again in fiscal 2010, to 274,951—a decline of 26.9 percent from fiscal 2008.
Whether for individual major events or for large and historically well-performing convention centers, two conclusions stand out regarding recent change. First, the drops in attendance have been remarkably pervasive, across a broad array of events and centers, including centers that have long dominated the industry. Second, the scale of attendance and hotel room night decline has been substantial, indeed remarkable. Those declines substantially exceed the fall-off in attendance in the years immediately after 9-11. Indeed, for convention centers in cities such as Atlanta and San Francisco, they represent a return to attendance levels seen a decade or two earlier, effectively wiping out the growth of the 1990s. This magnitude of attendee loss suggests a dynamic very different from what was seen after 9-11. For example, the Las Vegas Convention Center witnessed an attendance drop of 3 percent in 2002, followed by a further 6 percent in 2003. The center’s attendance drop of 30 percent from 2008 to 2009 is of an entirely different order of magnitude, an experience paralleled by many other centers.
The full import of the change in convention center attendance will only become clear over future years. But compared to the impact of previous recessions, the change in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 suggests a sea change in patterns of attendance and convention activity. One assessment was provided by the senior staff of New York’s Javits Center, in a December 3, 2010, presentation to the center’s board on “Maximizing Economic Impact.” After slides noting the “Sales Challenges” faced by the Javits, the presentation included a slide titled “Relevant Industry Trends.” The slide’s bullet points noted “Oversupply of convention center space” and “Economic challenges to convention center customers.”57
The Javits Center staff was fully aware of the impact of larger changes on the convention business. Javits convention and tradeshow attendance had fallen by 22.5 percent from 2007 to 2009. The “oversupply of convention center space” was not something that would go away after 2011 or 2012. A number of cities—Philadelphia and Indianapolis, for example—were about to complete major expansions at the time of the Javits presentation. And other cities—Boston, Cleveland, Nashville, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles—are building or planning center expansions. That continuing increase in supply acts to provide a counter to whatever attendance rebound might take place in the future.
The View from the Consultants
While terms like “oversupply of space” or “buyer’s market” were part of the industry’s discourse by 2009 and 2010, they were not part of the analysis by the small group of convention center consultants. Assessing the state of the convention and tradeshow market for Boston’s “T5 Partnership” in February 2010, John Kaatz of CSL International “showed the linkage between the economy and the events industry and suggested that in the future meeting planners believe this linkage will stay tightly related.” He illustrated that point with a chart of “Convention and Tradeshow Industry Growth Measures” from Tradeshow Week’s “200” data, adding a line labeled “Real GDP.” The lines for exhibit space use, number of exhibitors, and number of attendees showed steady growth through 2007. For 2008, the exhibitor and attendance counts showed a modest decline. But as if to reassure the partnership members, the chart’s line (shown in red) for Real GDP continued beyond 2008, showing strong upward movement in 2010 and 2011. If the “linkage” was indeed “tightly related,” the measures of convention demand would no doubt soon be on a similar upward path.58
Kaatz also presented charts of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center current and projected future occupancy. While center occupancy was shown as falling from 63.2 percent in fiscal 2008 to 53.2 percent in fiscal 2009, the chart indicated occupancy rates rising to a steady 70 percent for fiscal 2011, 2012, and 2013. Jim Rooney, CEO of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, concluded the February 2010 session with the observation that the “Tradeshow marketplace continues to grow and our competitors are growing physically in size and service offerings to meeting planners.”
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