How Las Vegas sells itself to convention planners

By Richard N. Velotta (contact)

Monday, July 2, 2001 | 11:13 a.m.

How big?

Just how big are the trade show floors of the city's largest convention facilities? Consider that a standard 100-yard football field (with two 10-yard end zones) is 360 feet long and 160 feet wide. So, a football field covers 57,600 square feet. That means:

Las Vegas has a lot of convention and meeting space to sell and big staffs of private and public marketers working to bring groups to the city.

The largest private center is the Sands Expo Center, which opened in 1990 and has 1.1 million square feet. The attached Venetian ballrooms add another 600,000 square feet.

Other key privately owned venues for conventions, meetings and conferences are:

Others with more than 100,000 square feet are:

In addition, the Stardust is constructing a new 40,500-square-foot center that will be ready by the end of the summer or early fall. It's adjacent to a 25,000-square-foot conference center.

The largest downtown Las Vegas meeting center is at the Golden Nugget hotel-casino, with 25,000 square feet of space.

Then, there are the public convention centers. The Las Vegas Convention Center has a total of about 1.9 million square feet, including more than 1 million square feet of exhibit halls, 90 meeting rooms with a total of 168,431 square feet and lobby registration space of 109,515 square feet, warehouse space, shops, restaurants and kitchens.

A 1.3 million-square-foot expansion of exhibit space, meeting rooms and lobby areas is expected to be completed by January.

The Convention Center is administered by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which has a board of directors comprised of hotel-casino executives and representatives of Clark County municipalities and county government. The LVCVA also oversees a downtown convention and meeting venue, Cashman Center.

Cashman has two exhibit halls with a total of 98,100 square feet of space, 16 meeting rooms with a total of 17,500 square feet, a theater with 1,940 seats and the 10,000-seat Cashman Field baseball stadium, which is home to the Los Angeles Dodgers AAA affiliate, the Las Vegas 51s.

Another public convention center is operated by the city of Henderson. It has 10,000 square feet of exhibit space and six meeting rooms covering a total of 3,765 square feet.

The responsibility of filling the more than 2 million square feet of LVCVA-administered meeting space rests with a staff of 17 people within the LVCVA Meetings Division, coordinated by Nancy Murphy, director of sales.

Murphy's organizational chart criss-crosses the meetings industry from several angles to assure that her 17 representatives are connected with people who make decisions about where and when they meet.

The sales representatives are divided geographically to handle contacts in the East, West, Midwest and central regions of the United States. The same 17 people are divided among convention sales -- shows large enough to use only the city's largest venues -- corporate sales, which involve business meetings for companies, and association sales, which include meetings and trade shows for associations and similar organizations.

One representative handles reunions -- schools, families, military and other get-togethers.

In addition to those categories, the 17 representatives have a breakdown of specialized accounts. For example, one representative handles government meetings, another focuses on legal organizations, another works with ethnic groups, another handles fraternal organizations and others specialize in insurance, pharmaceutical and automotive companies.

Murphy said her staff isn't just selling the LVCVA-administered venues. Armed with a 277-page guide filled with statistics, maps and descriptions for every hotel meeting venue in Southern Nevada, the Meetings Division representatives work to generate leads for the city's hotels.

Murphy said whenever anyone on her staff makes a contact, the LVCVA issues a lead bulletin to Las Vegas hotels via fax. The bulletin lists the organization planning the meeting, the contact name, address, phone number and e-mail address, the dates of the event, specifications for meeting rooms, the number of hotel rooms needed for delegates, a short profile of the organization and history of the event and other details that would help properties make a bid.

The LVCVA also promotes eight properties in Laughlin (108,600 square feet of exhibit space total), three in Mesquite (27,854 square feet) two in Boulder City (4,500 square feet) and five in Primm and Jean (67,780 square feet between two properties in Jean and three in Primm).

Like the LVCVA, private convention centers have big marketing programs.

Chuck Bowling, senior vice president of sales and marketing for the MGM Grand hotel-casino, said the property's conference center has been a huge success since it opened three years ago.

Bowling said the conference center hosts 100 to 110 meetings a month, with 70 to 80 percent of those handled under a program known as "Grand Meetings" -- those involving 150 or fewer attendees.

The three-story center has two ballrooms, one at 62,000 square feet (expandable to 100,000 square feet with an adjacent foyer) and another at 50,400 square feet, and 57 meeting rooms that can accommodate between 20 and 6,000 people.

Bowling said the Grand Meetings program specializes in rapid response. While most big conventions and shows are planned months and years in advance, the Grand Meetings program calendars events a week to three months ahead. Bowling said the level or service has resulted in plenty of repeat business -- 60 percent of those on the schedule are customers that have met there before.

The MGM Grand's "City of Entertainment" theme is a big selling point for the conference center with customers being reminded that they can see a number of shows, dance at Studio 54, eat at award-winning restaurants and play golf at three different courses if they book there.

Bowling has a staff of 13 sales representatives that have different geographical assignments as well as "vertical markets" of different categories of industries they call, similar to the organizational chart of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Each of the MGM MIRAGE properties have their own meetings sales staffs, but the different hotels share leads and make referrals to each other as well as offer rooms for each other's events.

Mandalay Resort Group will have a similar ability to offer rooms at its other hotels and its row of three properties extending south from Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue offers the advantage of three different price points.

When completed next summer, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center will be among the five largest in the country and the three hotels linked by an elevated rapid transit system have a total of 11,655 rooms.

Danielle Babilino, vice president of hotel sales for Mandalay Bay, believes Mandalay Bay's entry into the convention business won't cannibalize shows that already have set up in Las Vegas, but may possibly steal business from out of state.

"We look at our competition as New Orleans, Javitz (the Jacob Javitz Convention Center in New York), Atlanta, Orlando and McCormick (the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago)," Babilino said. "This facility should make us a major player in that industry. We don't see us as robbing Peter to pay Paul."

Babilino has a staff of 10 sales representatives that sell other special events besides meetings. When the convention center opens, she said the size of the staff would double.