Baltimore hotels exceeded their booking expectations for 2008 by more than 70,000 room nights, Mayor Sheila Dixon said Friday.
The Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association booked 451,608 room nights (one hotel room occupied for one night) for future years in 2008, Dixon said.
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A new advisory board, created by Dixon and headed by 1st Mariner Bank Chief Executive Officer Ed Hale, will oversee both the BACVA and the Baltimore Convention Center. Dixon hopes the advisory board, called the Baltimore Convention and Tourism Board, will help both organizations bring even more business to Baltimore.
“We have every key ingredient to be a successful city,” Dixon said. “All of our amenities are great.”
Dixon cited recent reductions in crime statistics as part of the reason for the influx of hotel and convention bookings.
Tom Noonan, president and chief executive officer of BACVA, said Baltimore?s hotel product has never been better, and the creation of an advisory committee for his organization and BCC will only strengthen that product.
“Our goal was 400,000 [room nights], and we thought that was a stretch,” he said.
Noonan said the 2008 hotel-booking number is almost double that of 2004?s number.
Vanessa Finnes, the executive vice president of the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show, the largest and longest-running event held at the Convention Center, is a member of the Baltimore Convention and Tourism Board. The trade show brings about 5,200 room nights to Baltimore every January.
“The best thing for us would be to have a bigger convention center,” she said. “We?ve expanded as the Convention Center has expanded. … If we had a bigger space, we?d fill it.” Finnes said the show is always a sellout.
There are currently no plans to expand the Convention Center, but a larger center would bring more convention traffic to Baltimore, said Peggy Daidakis, the Convention Center?s executive director.
“We?re sort of landlocked,” she said. “We can probably handle about 85 percent of the available events for a venue of our size.”
Daidakis said she tries to book smaller, overlapping conventions to the center so that when one convention is tearing down, another is in progress and another is getting ready to set up.
“That helps keep the hotels full,” she said.
Sam Rogers, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for BACVA, said Baltimore presents a high-quality product to would-be visitors.
The challenge in bringing people to Baltimore, he said, is not in the quality of the product but in promotion of that product.
“It has to do with getting the word out to a much broader audience,” he said. “It?s great if a city can add an attraction every decade, but you don?t need a new attraction every year; it?s not Disney World.”
