To Confence Or Not To Conference

The issue that never dies.

Conference Centre remains a solid investment for the city
Some excellent comments:)
"It doesn't sound like much, but for the struggling facility it's a landmark on the way to calling the project a success." At a projected 5% of capacity if this projected number of delegate days holds up and does not itself drop 50% as in the past we would still be looking at decades before we could ever call it a success.

One also needs to look at where these delegate days are coming from. Do they count the members of the church that holds services every Sunday at the conference Centre? Do they count the number of people at council meetings? If so what percentage of those numbers are accounted for in the delegate days tht we have had.

Also the $380ish dollars they say a delegate would spend would not forth coming from events that are held by groups already in the city. We, the taxpayers, will be paying for this for years to come.

Conference centre should post record year for bookings
More great comments on this story.

"But bookings have failed to meet the predictions of industry experts." Obviously!

One has to note that the so called industry 'experts' lobby for convention centers. The foremost expert on convention centers in North America, not part of the lobby group, warned back in 2004 that there were only 2 centers inn North America that were not heavily subsidized.

Last year at this time there were also 30,000 delegate days talked about which obviously did not happen and puts the ratio at 50% not the 25 spoken about above. Even were we to reach 30,000 that would equate to only 5% capacity.

We cannot and should not be focusing on a hotel but need to focus on other means to attract usage. The recent change to the liquor designation should help but with the cost of usage approximately double that of other venues it will be a tough slog..