Derrick Penner, Vancouver Sun, August 8, 2010

VANCOUVER - Vancouver Convention Centre general manager Ken Cretney considers the facility to be in a fortunate spot in challenging times.

While North America’s overall convention business is in the middle of a slump, Vancouver’s centre is registering respectable bookings, which its overseers hope will translate into record numbers of visitors.

Those visitors, with their hotel bookings, restaurant bills and retail spending, are seen as the payoff for its recent $883-million expansion.

"I think we’re in a position many centres in North America would appreciate being in over the next couple of years," Cretney said in an interview on a day the centre was buzzing with 5,600 statisticians in town for the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association.

"[And] what we have on the books right now would also be the envy of many of our competitors."

For its fiscal 2011, from April 1 to next March 31, that business is 416 events — from local trade shows, banquets and weddings to those coveted international gatherings.

However, using the convention industry’s own business measurement of non-resident delegate days, the Vancouver Convention Centre has already experienced some challenging times with its disappointing numbers for fiscal 2010.

Annual reports from the B.C. Pavilion Corp. (PavCo), the Crown corporation that operates the convention centre and BC Place Stadium, show that the centre generated 128,390 non-resident delegate days for fiscal 2010, which ended March 31. But its original projection was for 233,000 non-resident delegate days.

That was a slight improvement from the low point for the centre, fiscal 2009, after several years of progressively lower levels of business. In fiscal 2009, the centre saw 126,799 non-resident delegate days, in fiscal 2008 the number was 147,119 and by the end of fiscal 2007, it was 173,547.

(Non-resident delegate days are a calculation of the number of delegates attending events multiplied by the number of days they attend.)

To date in 2010, the centre has hosted the Pediatric Academic Society with more than 6,000 delegates, the American Association for Justice with 3,000 delegates, and the Globe 2010 conference on business and the environment with 7,000 delegates.

Cretney said the next big meeting is the XXIII International Congress of the Transplantation Society, which should draw more than 5,000 delegates for a five-day gathering beginning next weekend.

It is an amount of business that has the convention centre’s boosters praising the facility, from its managers right up to the political masters that the Crown corporation reports to.

"We’re thrilled with our bookings," says Kevin Krueger, B.C.’s minister for tourism, culture and the arts.

The centre is still basking in the afterglow of the 2010 Olympics, which Krueger said gave it worldwide exposure and advertising "that we never would have been able to afford to buy." He sat in on some of the hospitality events the province hosted during the Olympics to sell the convention centre’s services, which he said put it in the front running to host some very large events.

He pointed optimistically at the convention centre’s 2011 bookings as a base they hope to expand upon.

"For 2011, we’ve already contracted for the biggest convention year in Vancouver’s history, and we expect we’ll keep growing it from there," he added.

Growth, however, isn’t guaranteed in an international convention market that has been shrinking, and the government’s political opposition is expressing concerns over potential gaps in the convention centre’s calendar further into the future.

"I sincerely hope the government didn’t overestimate the popularity of [the convention centre]," cautions Spencer Chandra Herbert, the NDP critic for Krueger’s portfolio.

Chandra Herbert said there were warnings that expansion plans might be overly ambitious as early as 2003, with a briefing document titled Making Canada Place A Better Place prepared for the committee examining the convention centre’s expansion.

Among the document’s concerns was that the convention market was changing in the post 9/11 environment.

Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas-San Antonio, studies the convention industry and has noted how much the North American market has shrunk just as cities across the continent rushed to expand their facilities.

Sanders cited figures from the industry publication Tradeshow Week that track the industry’s growth from 4,380 conventions or meetings across the continent in 1995 to a peak of 5,036 in 2007.

By 2010, however, that count had fallen to 4,736. And Tradeshow Week estimated attendance at meetings in 2010 would come in at 86 million delegates, compared with attendance of 126 million at events in 2000.

At the same time, Sanders said, cities such as Ottawa and Niagara Falls have opened new convention centres, and cities ranging from Toronto to Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego are contemplating major expansions of their facilities.

"Vancouver, like any other community, faces a dramatically increased competitive environment," Sanders said.

He noted that the convention centre’s backers pushed an expansion with the expectation that it would more than double the amount of business it generated, "but so have lots of other places."

The new Vancouver Convention Centre opened in April 2009 near the old convention centre at Canada Place.

Looking at the convention centre’s calendar, Chandra Herbert worries about potential gaps.

"I’d like to see it as full as possible, and ideally we would get to a place where it didn’t have to be taking millions of dollars in direct subsidies," he said.

PavCo is in line for a $14.7-million subsidy for the current fiscal year.

Cretney said management’s objective is to balance the types of events it holds to maximize the amount of out-of-town visitors it draws, with a view to minimizing the subsidy that it needs.

For the current fiscal year, the centre’s projection is for 452,000 non-resident delegate days; it has generated 185,610 of those days with the events it has hosted to date.

Cretney added that another positive sign is that several associations that held events here this year have already booked repeat business. The American Bar Association is one, which booked a date for 2018, and the Pediatric Academic Society, which re-booked for 2016.

Warren Buckley, PavCo’s CEO, said the sales pitch will continue to keep filling the centre in future years.

Of the types of big meetings that occur, Buckley said it was corporate meetings, particularly those of American companies, that suffered the biggest downturns.

He added that the meetings of international associations, such as the transplantation group coming Aug. 15, have seen more stability, and are key targets of the Vancouver centre’s marketing.

Buckley said Vancouver as a location is one of the convention centre’s advantages in competing for the business of those associations, which are looking to Asia and India to build their memberships.

"North America has overbuilt the number of convention centres [the market needs]," Buckley conceded. "[But] there is not a convention centre like this in the world. That’s the opportunity Vancouver has."

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