Hotel & meeting facilities

Latin CEO: Executive Strategies for the Americas, August-Sept, 2002

Greater Miami has built its reputation as a visitor's paradise. While the bulk of travelers arriving in the city come for pleasure, a sizeable slice arrive for business conventions and meetings. And Miami has the infrastructure to more than meet any foreseeable demand.

What a difference a year makes. Last year, directly in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Material World apparel trade show at the Miami Beach Convention Center literally unraveled. "The show opened on the tenth of September," recalls Suzanne Pruitt, a spokeswoman for Urban Expositions, the show's producers. "We were really excited." After the attacks, most of the conference-goers "just wanted to get home," she says. "It pretty much shut us down."

Not so this year. Atlanta-based Urban Expositions is expecting 3,000 attendees for the show's third annual appearance at the Miami Beach Convention Center in October. Next year, Material World is planning to expand the meeting to a bi-annual event in Miami Beach, with a new March show to complement the October event, covering both the spring and fall fashion seasons.

"It's going very well," Pruitt says of development of future Material World events in Miami Beach, a venue her company considers well-suited for apparel-industry networking. "It's kind of a high-style, high-fashion city," she says. Plus, "Miami is the natural gateway to Latin America and it's also a very accessible place for North Americans."

The same sentiment is expressed by hoteliers and convention spokespersons countywide. Chris Price, manager of the Graphics Show of the Americas, says that 22,100 attendees came to their show on Miami Beach in early February. Based on strong sales volume by exhibitors at the 2002 show, he expects the event's attendance to grow significantly in 2003.

While other Florida cities, namely hotel-heavy Orlando, are major rivals for group business, Greater Miami is basking in a recent surge of hotel and facility development. In the last few years, it has added some 3,000 rooms in new, luxury hotels, ranging from a Marriott hotel in the Brickell Avenue financial district, to the convention-enabled Loews hotel on Miami Beach.

"When I came to work for the Fontainebleau in the late 1970s, we were the only ones around here," recalls Lisa Cole, the public relations director of the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort, which has 190,000 square feet of meeting space. Now the 48-year-old Miami Beach landmark is getting expensive improvements--US$65 million worth since 1998--to counter competition from younger venues, like the Loews Miami Beach Hotel, which opened four years ago with 65,000 square feet of meeting space.

Indeed, stepped-up development of hotel rooms and meeting space was encouraged across Greater Miami by the the Loews' 1998 opening, says Miami-based Scott Berman, a partner in the hospitality and leisure practice of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. "It was the catalyst." Now, he says, "were getting more hotels than we can absorb."

Having too many hotels has hardly diminished Miami's appeal as a meeting destination, however. After all, one company's surplus is another company's selection - and for meeting planners, the selection of qualified sites gets broader every year.

For Miami, the meeting and convention industry remains big business, and a big draw for visitors from the Americas. Last year, if Canada is included, more than 4,350,000 foreign visitors arrived in Miami from the Americas; if Canada is excluded, there were 3,770,000 visitors from Latin America and the Caribbean. About 14 percent of those Latin and Caribbean visitors - well over half a million - came strictly for business purposes. In terms of just conventions (the majority of business travel is for individual meetings) Miami-Dade County attracts roughly 1 million visitors a year, who collectively spend about US$1 billion. (In 2001, that figure reached US$1.1 billion, with 997,000 convention delegates).

The year 2002 may not look as good, largely because of the fear-of-flying induced by the terrorist attacks. Meeting Professionals International, a trade group, says that about one third of the meeting planners and suppliers they surveyed are seeing an increase in video and teleconferencing as an alternative to travel in 2002.

"I meet with the hotels on a regular basis, and things are relatively flat compared to the last few years," says Ita Moriarty, the senior vice president of convention sales at the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau (GMCVB). "But before 9/11 it was accelerating at an incredible pace."

The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables is one property that speciahzes in servicing numerous smaller groups from major multinationals, clients such as Pfizer, GE Capital, Bascom Palmer and Louis Vuitton. Almost two-thirds of the hotel's business comes from such bookings and, until 9/11, somewhere between 35 percent and 45 percent of their business clientele was coming from Latin America and the Caribbean.

"Our bread and butter is the daily and weekly visits by the corporate accounts, and the small sessions such as corporate meetings, association meetings and social meetings," says Eli White, corporate vice president for the Seaway Group, which owns the Biltmore. In the year since 9111, says White, business clientele from Latin American and the Caribbean has fallen to between 25 percent and 30 percent of the hotel bookings.