When Texas-based professor Heywood Sanders came to Halifax last November and spoke to city council about the state of the convention business, he was treated shabbily as a CFA who doesn’t know anything about Halifax. One objection that was raised several times was that Sanders might know a lot about the convention centre business in the United States, but “Canada is different.”
At the time, that criticism fell a little short, as Sanders provided plenty of stats from the failing Vancouver Convention Centre. But today he provides yet more Canadian-specific convention centre figures, this data from the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, which assures us on its website that it was “Voted the #1 convention destination in North America for ‘Superior Convention Services’.”
Sanders collected stats from several years as published in the MTCCC’s annual reports, all placed them all in one table, as follows:
“I’ll leave it to you or any interested observer how they choose to characterize the convention business based on this,” Sanders adds sardonically.
I fully expect promoters of the Halifax convention centre will now explain that Halifax is of course entirely different from Toronto, and our new convention centre will boom, boom, boom. Frankly, while as a resident and taxpayer in this fair city I am opposed to the new convention centre, as a journalist I’m sort of glad it’s moving forward, so I can track just how disastrously it will perform.
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This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2011.
Conventional wisdom is always wrong.
Huge. Waste. Of. Money.
I will eat my own hat if this centre ever loses less than a million bucks a year. That would be a staggering success…
To think it will be profitable? Utterly foolish.
Keep it up Tim. This whole thing is a joke from the get-go.
I’m not a huge fan of the convention center idea, but I gotta say that this article and argument are complete bunk. I plotted that data and found that over the given time period there’s a mild upward trend in number of conventions, and a mild downward trend in both peak and total room nights. But when you look at the R^2 values for those trends (a measure between 0 and 1 of how meaningful or strong the trend actually is) they are miniscule – 0.07, 0.01, and 0.02, respectively (meaningful trends are typically interpreted as R^2 values of 0.50 or higher). Basically the gist of what I’m saying is that the data you’ve presented doesn’t support your argument, and in fact refutes it.
I suspect Hayward Sanders has left the characterization of the data to us because he knows what it says and hopes we’ll instead just pick out that for one year there were 299,000 attendees and conclude (incorrectly) that since 2010 was lower than that the convention business is in a huge downward slide.
Again, I’m not a fan of the convention center and I think that there are many valid arguments that can be made against it. However, this is not one of them and to present it as such really hurts your credibility.
hipp5– if you’re planning just staying even in any business, you want at least more than predicted rate of inflation, or more than 2 percent a year growth. There’s been nothing like that in the convention industry. If you want to *expand* your business, you should expect far more than the the increase simple inflation would bring. Even if Halifax sees a slight increase in convention business– and it might– it won’t see anywhere near the growth needed to justify the expenditure on the new CC.
Keeping up with inflation requires growth in income, which is not necessarily growth in customers (or room nights or whatever). If growth in room nights (or customers) was the only thing that could keep a business in business then our world would be in a whole lot of trouble. Hotels would have to add 2% more rooms on every year (and that would be compounded!). After 75 years the Sheraton would eat up downtown Halifax, or it would go out of business because there was no more room to build rooms to accommodate this required customer growth.
In reality, it’s a heckava lot easier to stay in business by keeping a stable customer base sized to your business and just raise prices to account for inflation.