The new convention landscape - Meeting & Convention Facilites

South Florida CEO, July, 2002 by Mike Seemuth

After a nasty downturn following the Sept. 11 attacks, the business of meetings and conventions in South Florida is back on track, more or less. One caveat on comparisons with 2001 is that, before September, the year set a record pace that even a perfect business climate would be hard-pressed to re-create.

Material World came unraveled last year in a frayed staging of the apparel trade show. Attendance and response were strong when the show made its debut at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 2000. The show's producer, Atlanta-based Urban Expositions, was upbeat about its prospects in 2001, especially on the first day, when throngs of attendees began arriving in Miami Beach. "We were really excited:' recalls Suzanne Pruitt, a spokeswoman for Urban Expositions. "The show opened on the tenth of September."

The next morning, the infamous attacks by terrorists armed with hijacked planes stranded many of the apparel professionals who had planned to fly into South Florida for the show, including a big contingent from New York. Among show-goers who arrived prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, many "just wanted to get home," Pruitt says. "It pretty much shut us down."

Unfazed, Urban Expositions expects to reap more of what it has "sewn" through Material World. The three-day show is scheduled to make its third annual appearance at the Miami Beach Convention Center in October of this year, with attendance of at least 3,000 projected. And in 2003, Material World will expand to a biannual happening 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 apparelindustry networking. "It's kind of a highstyle, 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 terrorist attacks and subsequent slide in travel caused South Florida's overall convention and meeting business to unravel a bit, too. Since Sept. 11, attendance at several conventions and trade shows here has been less than hoped for, and at least one major event, the Panamerican Leather Show in Miami Beach, has been canceled. But, like the company behind Material World, many others in the business of producing conventions, trade shows and corporate meetings continue to see South Florida as a preferred venue.

"Our attendance numbers were down about 12 percent," says Chris Price, manager of the Graphics Show of the Americas, a three-day printing-industry event that brought 22,100 attendees to Miami Beach in early February. Based on strong sales volume by exhibitors at the 2002 show, however, Price expects the event's attendance to rebound in 2003 - and to remain in Miami Beach, though "there's always talk that we should consider Orlando."

While hotel-heavy Orlando remains a major in-state rival for group business, South Florida offers more meeting venues to choose from than ever before. Long favored as a leisure destination, South Florida has seen millions of dollars poured into fresh facilities for associations, corporations and other organizations to gather in, giving the tri-county region a veritable shopping mall of meeting spaces to accompany the traditional lures of water and warm weather.

"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 -- $65-million worth since 1998 -- to counter competition from younger venues such as 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 South Florida by the the Loews's 1998 opening, says Scott Berman of Miami, partner in the hospitality and leisure practice of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. "It was the catalyst." Now, he says, "we're re getting more hotels than we can absorb."

Having too many hotels has hardly diminished South Florida'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 in South Florida gets broader every year.

"Despite every new product that has been opened in the last 15 years, our business has done better," says David Feder, president and CEO of the 75-year-old Boca Resort & Club, which has 140,000 square feet of meeting space and plans to build more. "I think they increase the [South Florida] market. If you've got a good product, it's going to create more awareness."

One of the biggest convention venues in the region just opened in January: the $800 million Westin Diplomat Resort in Hollywood, with 209,000 square feet of meeting space. "A hotel of this size and scope has the ability to attract huge numbers of meetings and conventions that otherwise would be unable to meet here," says South Florida economist Hank Fishkind.