More than a dozen organizations and companies representing thousands of members and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue have passed over the District for their upcoming conventions, citing the lack of a hotel at the Washington Convention Center, convention officials said Monday.
“The perception of our great city by customers is that we are not really positioned to host the meetings that we aggressively purse,” Elliott Ferguson II, senior vice president with the D.C. Convention and Tourism Corp., told the D.C. Council’s economic development committee, headed by Council Member Kwame Brown.
The District recently reached an agreement with Marriott International for a 1,150-room hotel adjacent to the convention center. The Marriott Marquis, a pared-down version of a previously approved 1,400-room hotel, is not expected to open until at least 2011.
Ferguson said 17 organizations and major corporations have ruled out the District for their annual conventions between 2008 and 2010. They represent potentially 131,500 attendees, 309,531 room nights and $163.7 million in economic impact.
For example, Ferguson said, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and its 32,000 conference attendees looked elsewhere for 2009 and even 2013 — fearing the Marriott Marquis wouldn’t be finished by then. Intergraph Corp., Deloitte & Touche, Microsoft and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers also were lost opportunities.
The American Urological Association, with 17,000 attendees, is reconsidering Washington as the site of its May 2011 meeting. The group fears competition for hotel rooms from another convention and the families of local college graduates, Ferguson said.
Norman Jenkins, senior vice president of Marriott, said he hoped to begin construction in early 2008. But Neil Albert, deputy mayor for planning and economic development, indicated the project might not start before 2009, though he will “push really hard to get a groundbreaking by 2008.”
The $540 million Marquis, which is expected to take 18 to 24 months to construct, is slated to include 39,000 square feet of ballroom space and 25,000 square feet of meeting space.
The District still must acquire two parcels on the hotel’s footprint, and it has agreed to invest $134 million in the project though tax increment financing.
