The staffs of the Iowa Events Center and the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau are successfully using a tag-team approach to attract new events to the area.

“We have an awesome relationship with the CVB,” said Andy Long, the general manager of the Iowa Events Center. “We all have the same interests at heart. We may work under different umbrellas, but we’re trying to take it in the same direction to generate more interest for events in Des Moines. By working together, we can better reach those goals.”

Long said the Events Center’s sales staff holds regular meetings with their counterparts from the CVB to discuss how to best attract conventions, meetings and amateur or collegiate sporting events that would potentially be interested in using the Events Center’s facilities. The two groups worked together on pitching Des Moines to the National Collegiate Athletic Association for its women’s basketball tournament and wrestling championships. Des Moines was selected for the first and second rounds of the women’s basketball tournament, and until this fall, was a finalist for the wrestling tournament.

“We work jointly with the CVB on everything coming through,” Long said. “We like to think of them as an extension of our staff, and hopefully we’re doing the same with them.”

The Events Center has a sales force of five who focus on convention business and a marketing staff of six who concentrate on sporting events. The CVB employs nine people whose primary job is to “put heads in beds” by booking meetings and events in Greater Des Moines.

Greg Edwards, the CVB’s president and CEO, said new entertainment venues such as the Iowa Events Center and new attractions such as the Science Center of Iowa and Jordan Creek Town Center are enhancing his staff’s ability to book additional conventions and meetings.

The CVB released its annual marketing report for fiscal 2004-05 earlier this month. It showed that between July 1, 2004, and June 30 2005, the organization hosted 473 meetings and conventions and 290 sporting events, compared with 466 meetings and 197 sporting events a year earlier. According to the report, more than 2 million visitors came to Greater Des Moines in 2004. Edwards expects the number of visitors to climb 3 to 5 percent in 2005.

“Overall, the biggest impact that we’re going to see in the next few years is that Des Moines has really become kind of a new venue,” Edwards said. “We have the new Iowa Events Center, the new Science Center of Iowa, and so much construction throughout the area, including new restaurants. Everything is just new and exciting and that gives us an opportunity to get the word out there to say, ‘Come check us out now.’”

Two years ago, Greater Des Moines’ hotel occupancy rate was 57.7 percent. In 2004, with 118 more hotel rooms available than during the previous year, the occupancy rate climbed to 62.3 percent. This exceeded the national average for occupancy, which was 60 percent. This year, 182 hotel rooms were added in Greater Des Moines, and Edwards expects strong occupancy rates to continue as a result of the CVB booking additional events.

“We’re up to 9,000 hotel rooms now in Greater Des Moines, and the more inventory you have, the harder you have to work to bring new groups here to increase the number of hotel bookings,” he said.

During the most recent fiscal year, the CVB booked 194 new conventions and 159 additional sporting events. Edwards attributes a large portion of the increased bookings to the opening of the Events Center.

“Just recently, we had the Women of Faith conference in there, which brought in thousands of women from all over, and then we ended that weekend with an Iowa Stars hockey game,” he said. “It’s proving itself to be a very diversified center in that it can host anything from meetings to conventions to trade shows to sporting events and family events.”

The Events Center’s Long believes that his venue would have an even easier task of drawing new events to Des Moines if an attached headquarters hotel were built. On Oct. 13, the Polk County Board of Supervisors released the findings of a market and feasibility study that concluded that there is sufficient demand to support the development of a 450-room headquarters hotel.

Polk County spent $25,000 on the study, which considered market factors such as economic and demographic profiles, the tourism industry and competition, as well as regional and national trends. Pinnacle Advisory Group, a Boston-based hospitality consulting company, conducted the study.

“From my standpoint, the hotel would give us as the Iowa Events Center a much stronger position and much better marketability so we can go out and get more business for the downtown area,” Long said.

“As bigger events come to the area, that would mean more business for other downtown hotels and establishments, and would continue to drive that economic impact across the county. As more entertainment business comes to Des Moines, more business will continue to follow it. The more shows that come and play Des Moines, whether it’s for myself or the Civic Center, it increases our visibility and odds of bringing in more events in the future.”