It'll never be as flashy or as famous as the white tigers and phony volcanoes up the street, but the new 1.4-million-square-foot Mandalay Bay Convention Center proved even before its debut today to be a showstopper for the U.S. convention industry.
The Mandalay Bay convention site, a $235 million complex at the foot of the Las Vegas Strip, has already plucked the annual Promotional Products Association International conference from Dallas, where the group had met for 26 years. Its 20,000 guests spent about $35 million in Dallas in 2002.
Snowsports Industries of America, a trade show with 25,000 participants that had skated dependably into the Las Vegas Convention Center every year since 1975, is also moving to Mandalay Bay this year. And Computer Associates of Islandia, N.Y., which had previously drawn 10,000 each year to either Orlando, Fla., or New Orleans, checks in to Mandalay Bay this summer.
Meeting planners and analysts say there's one good reason for the draw: Mandalay Resort Group also owns 12,000 hotel rooms at three megaresorts -- Mandalay Bay, Luxor and Excalibur -- adjacent to the conference center, and will arrange deals under one contract for both the exhibit hall and for blocks of rooms at all three hotels, each in a different price category.
The resort group plans to open a 1,100-suite tower at Mandalay Bay next fall. It already has an additional 6,700 other rooms on the Strip through its 50 percent-owned Monte Carlo hotel and casino a half-mile north of the exhibition hall and its Circus Circus hotel and casino.
"There's really no model quite like what Mandalay Bay has," said Michael J. Hughes, research director for Tradeshow Week, an industry magazine. "What's interesting is that they can offer three distinct price points. Excalibur is low-end, Luxor is midtier, and the Mandalay Bay itself is high-end. I can't think of another private venue or hotel or even a municipal venue that has so many hotel rooms right there."
That is likely to trouble many other places. The leaders of more than 80 American cities are banking on the construction or expansion of convention centers to revive their downtowns and to lift flagging tax revenues. Conventions in the United States are a $100 billion-a-year business, and municipalities from Washington to Boise, Idaho, are spending a total of more than $10 billion on convention facilities. But the number of major new trade shows is rising only marginally each year, and attendance nationally has slumped for seven consecutive quarters through 2002.
Mandalay Bay's debut means that Las Vegas, which already has the 2.2-million-square-foot Las Vegas Convention Center and the 1.3-million-square-foot Sands Expo and Convention Center, is poised to tighten the stranglehold it grabbed in the 1990s as the country's top convention destination. Now home to three of the seven largest exhibit halls in the United States, it is scheduled to be host for 163 of the biggest conferences this year. In second place is New York, with 141, Tradeshow Week figures indicate.
As a gambling mecca, Las Vegas once viewed convention traffic as filler for slow tourist periods; these days, the city covets lucrative business travelers to fill its 127,000 hotel rooms. On average, each leaves behind $1,200, beyond what is spent on gambling. Hughes said that the availability of hotels, including thousands of upscale suites, as well as the ease of air access, good weather, vast entertainment choices and a national demographic shift westward, had helped Las Vegas shake off its stigma as Sin City and attract "just about any kind of group, even religious groups."
A rivalry is bound to develop between the Mandalay and the other private exhibit hall, the Sands Expo, which is adjacent to the 3,000-suite Venetian Hotel and Casino on the Strip. Convention planners already hope to use the competition to secure cheaper exhibit rates. The list price at the Sands is 35 cents per square foot of exhibit space, higher than the Mandalay Bay's listed 30 cents. And both rates are higher than the Las Vegas Convention Center, at 25 cents.
"Public facilities will always offer you better pricing because they're subsidized by the taxpayer," said Eric Bello, Venetian's vice president for sales. "But it's what you get for the price. One of the objectives of show management is to keep the attendee on the floor because that's what makes exhibitors happy. Well, we've got everything under the same roof, and we're at the epicenter of the Strip. Having a convention right here with all the attractions we have is a unique benefit and well worth the price differential."
While some of the 56 shows booked at the new site this year are moving over from other Las Vegas venues, most are poached from elsewhere.
"We didn't build 1.4 million square feet of exhibit hall space
to move business across the street," Mandalay Resort Group President
Glenn Schaeffer said. "We built it to move business across the
country."
###
Go
to list of New York Times articles
Go
to list of Publications
