No. 11 hotel & meeting facilities: Greater Miami is known as a visitor's paradise. It is also a center for meetings and conventions, now enhanced with a new crop of top hotels - FTAA

South Florida CEO, Oct, 2003

The opening of the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami in October represents more than just the arrival of the tallest US building south of Atlanta. It marks the last chapter in an extraordinary burst of first-class hotel construction that began with the Loews Miami Beach Hotel in 1998 and has since included a new four-diamond Mandarin Oriental on Brickell Key, a JW Marriot on Brickell Avenue, a Royal Palm adjacent to the Loews and fully three Ritz-Carlton Hotels in Greater Miami.

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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, with an eye as much toward the business and convention traveler as the tourist.

"When I came to work for the Fontainebleau in the late 1970s, we were the only ones around here," recalls Lisa Cole, 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 has been totally renovated--US$65 million worth since 1998--to counter competition from younger venues, such as the Loews, which has 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' opening, says Scott Berman, a Miami-based partner in the hospitality and leisure practice of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. "It was the catalyst." Now, he says, "we're getting more hotels than we can absorb."

Having too many hotels has hardly diminished Miami's appeal as a meeting destination, however. If anything, it has increased the selection of qualified sites for meeting planners.

For Miami, the meeting and convention industry remains big business, and a big draw for visitors from the Americas. In 2002, if Canada is included, more than 3.6 million foreign visitors arrived in Miami from the Americas; if Canada is excluded, there were 3.1 million visitors from Latin America and the Caribbean. A significant percentage of those Latin and Caribbean visitors came strictly for business purposes. In terms of just conventions (the majority of business travel is for individual meetings) Miami-Dade County attracted 907,725 convention delegates last year, who collectively spend about US$1 billion. In next-door Broward County, some 30 percent of its visitors come for business; in 2002, 525,000 room nights were booked for meetings and conventions.

Serving the corporate meeting sector doesn't just depend on massive conventions, either. The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables specializes 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 between 35 percent and 45 percent of the business clientele comes 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. "If we didn't have these facilities, it would diminish the attractiveness of Miami as a connecting point," he says. "We wouldn't be in the running."

Greater Miami's Convention Business

Year  Number of  Number of    Expenditures
      Delegates  Room Nights  (in US]

1997  1,100,200  2,500,800    $1,100,200
1998  856,000    2,341,900    $937,990
1999  898,800    2,458,995    $984,890
2000  943,740    2,581,945    $1,034,134
2001  955,500    2,711,042    $1,085,841
2002  907,725    2,575,490    $998,973

Source: IACVB Annual Income Survey, GMGVB

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Visitors who came to Miami for business purposes last year: 907,725

Amount spent by convention delegates in Miami in the year 2002: US$1 billion

Number of new luxury hotel rooms added to Miami in last four years: 3,000