This calendar year has been a banner year for Greater Des Moines’ hotel and convention business, and new opportunities may emerge in 2005 as an additional downtown meeting space, Hy-Vee Hall, becomes fully operational.

According to Vicki Comegys, the director of sales and services for the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau, Greater Des Moines has proven itself in 2004 to be an attractive option for corporate meetings, state associations and athletics, all of which attract groups to the area on a temporary basis, and are therefore, lumped together by the CVB as convention traffic.

“The convention market is still holding strong and increasing,” Comegys said. “There are so many different types of meetings that they span all through the metropolitan area. The corporate meetings and state associations are typically using hotel convention facilities on top of the hotel rooms they book.”

Comegys said the CVB’s role in getting conventions coordinated with the area hotels and facilities involves acting as a middleman. Ultimately, though, it’s up to the local hotels and meeting facilities to sell their ideas to the groups who are considering hosting an event.

Different hotels take different approaches in marketing their facilities, but all are confident that their location is well-suited to particular groups. At the Airport Holiday Inn, for example, sales director Barb Reynolds says she works with a lot of out-of-town groups and associations who are more interested in accessibility than the downtown Des Moines experience.

“There are groups that prefer to be on the edge of the city,” Reynolds said. “They don’t want to deal with the traffic or navigating the downtown area, and once they’ve tried us, many of them will return the next year too.”

Similarly, the University Park Holiday Inn in Clive and the West Des Moines Marriott point to their locations as selling points when visiting with groups who might book their meeting facilities.

Van Spitzer, the general manager of the University Park Holiday Inn, says that in addition to its on-site restaurant, his hotel can boast about 15 or 16 restaurants within walking distance, which is an advantage it has over many other hotels with conference facilities. Also, corporate groups seem to like that the hotel is in close proximity to many office parks, he said. He says the hotel’s 15,000 square feet of meeting space seems to be highly coveted, as on average, 80 percent of it is used on a given weekday.

Further west yet, at the West Des Moines Marriott, sales director Laura Warner said her hotel is benefiting from its close proximity to the new Jordan Creek Town Center, which is an attractive entertainment option for conference attendees and their spouses during their free time.

“The biggest thing is being able to talk to prospective clients about how close our location is to Jordan Creek,” Warner said. “I have a convention this month that the mall was a big selling point for when I was competing against some other hotels in West Des Moines and downtown. Another convention indicated that a location close to Jordan Creek was going to be a goal for the next convention, where they had been downtown before.”

Even if some conventions choose Des Moines suburbs, that will be offset by the amount of new convention business that could enter downtown when Hy-Vee Hall officially opens later this year, Comegys said.

“With the opening of the new Iowa Events Center, we will have new opportunities,” she said. “Since we’ll have more meeting space close together than ever before, we are able to look at groups who would utilize both (Polk County Convention Complex and Hy-Vee Hall) facilities because they are so large. This will not only benefit the downtown hotels, but will bring overflow business into all of Greater Des Moines.”

Year-round success

According to the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau, which measures all of the temporary group traffic to the area, conventions generated $55 million in economic impact during fiscal year 2004, surpassing the previous year by $5 million.

Vicki Comegys, the CVB’s director of sales and services, said calendar year

2004 has been an “exceptional year” for hotel and convention visitors to Greater Des Moines. In August, Greater Des Moines had hotel occupancy of 81.8 percent, compared to 73.7 percent in August 2003. In January of this year, hotel occupancy was 53 percent, compared to 43.8 percent in 2003.

Comegys said the months of September, October and November are strong months for the Des Moines area to host state, regional and national conventions, many of which seek out hotels with conference center facilities.

In the competition for conventions, five local hotels boast meeting spaces that can serve at least 1,000 people: The Des Moines Marriott, the Embassy Suites, the Hotel Fort Des Moines, the Holiday Inn Airport and the University Park Holiday Inn.