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As #eventprofs, we spend a lot of time in convention centers. But did you know some of those venues have a fascinating history behind them? You'll learn about 6 of them in this BizBash article ... and if you know interesting trivia about others, please share in the comments! https://lnkd.in/ghTd6C-B #tradeshows #tradeshowmarketing #conventioncenters

So many considerations and so many boxes to ✅ I consider myself lucky to work with a team of seasoned event professionals, who understand the importance of considering every detail, from the practical to the intangible, to create an experience that leaves a lasting impression. Whether it's ensuring the venue's capacity aligns with your guest list 📋 or selecting a location that resonates with your event's purpose, each decision contributes to the overall experience. Depending on your event's unique requirements, some factors may carry more weight ⚖ than others. Keep these elements in mind when selecting the perfect venue to bring your event to life! 🎤 🥂 🎉 #EventPlanning #VenueSelection #EventManagement #EventPlanners #EventCoordination #EventsFrankston #EventsatFAC

Comic-Con May Leave San Diego Due To Price Gouging: "For 55 years, San Diego Comic-Con has been offering fans and aficionados of all things comic and movie related a place to meet, gawk, show off, and in general bask in their geekery," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "That may be coming to an end. Due to hotels' price gouging the cost of rooms, Comic-Con may be moving." Forbes reports: "We would never want to leave, but if push came to shove and it became untenable for us, it's something that we would certainly have to look into," said David Glanzer, Chief Communication and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con International, the nonprofit group that puts on SDCC and WonderCon, in a phone interview Monday. "As event planners, we're always contacted by different cities and it would be reckless for us to not at least acknowledge that." Asked if the show was locked in to San Diego for 2025, Glanzer responded, "2025 is when our contract expires, unless something happens before the convention this year. And if so, I imagine we would make an announcement during the show." The sticking point for the Convention is the behavior of some of the hotels in the area. For decades, SDCC has negotiated block rates for rooms that they offer to out-of-town attendees, exhibitors, professionals and guests at a discount. Typically, the more deluxe hotels within walking distance of the convention center run $275-335/night, and ones further out can be had for as low as $215 through the Con's hotel site for registered attendees. Competition for rooms in the desirable hotels has become so intense that the day the reservations open has become known as "Hotelocapylse." Recently, Glanzer said some hotels have been making fewer and fewer rooms available in the blocks, knowing they can charge top dollar on the open market. Rates for non-block rooms during Comic-Con weekend at some of the bigger hotels can go for two or three times the ordinary high season rate, and even smaller hotels and Airbnbs in the area charge significantly more to take advantage of the peak demand. Now that opportunistic behavior is threatening to kill the golden goose that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars into the city in a single week. "If attendees opt not to come because they can't afford to stay at a hotel here, they'll go to another convention," said Glanzer. "And if that starts to happen, the studios won't be able to make as big an impact, and it becomes a downward spiral that no one wants to go down. If we can't accommodate the people who want to attend the show then we're in a pretty bad situation." "I think there is a belief that because we opened the Comic-Con Museum here [in San Diego] and we have always had the show here, that we are anchored to San Diego and could never leave. Well, we don't want to leave, but we've run conventions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose, and they were very successful. I think there ar

Comic-Con May Leave San Diego Due To Price Gouging: "For 55 years, San Diego Comic-Con has been offering fans and aficionados of all things comic and movie related a place to meet, gawk, show off, and in general bask in their geekery," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "That may be coming to an end. Due to hotels' price gouging the cost of rooms, Comic-Con may be moving." Forbes reports: "We would never want to leave, but if push came to shove and it became untenable for us, it's something that we would certainly have to look into," said David Glanzer, Chief Communication and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con International, the nonprofit group that puts on SDCC and WonderCon, in a phone interview Monday. "As event planners, we're always contacted by different cities and it would be reckless for us to not at least acknowledge that." Asked if the show was locked in to San Diego for 2025, Glanzer responded, "2025 is when our contract expires, unless something happens before the convention this year. And if so, I imagine we would make an announcement during the show." The sticking point for the Convention is the behavior of some of the hotels in the area. For decades, SDCC has negotiated block rates for rooms that they offer to out-of-town attendees, exhibitors, professionals and guests at a discount. Typically, the more deluxe hotels within walking distance of the convention center run $275-335/night, and ones further out can be had for as low as $215 through the Con's hotel site for registered attendees. Competition for rooms in the desirable hotels has become so intense that the day the reservations open has become known as "Hotelocapylse." Recently, Glanzer said some hotels have been making fewer and fewer rooms available in the blocks, knowing they can charge top dollar on the open market. Rates for non-block rooms during Comic-Con weekend at some of the bigger hotels can go for two or three times the ordinary high season rate, and even smaller hotels and Airbnbs in the area charge significantly more to take advantage of the peak demand. Now that opportunistic behavior is threatening to kill the golden goose that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars into the city in a single week. "If attendees opt not to come because they can't afford to stay at a hotel here, they'll go to another convention," said Glanzer. "And if that starts to happen, the studios won't be able to make as big an impact, and it becomes a downward spiral that no one wants to go down. If we can't accommodate the people who want to attend the show then we're in a pretty bad situation." "I think there is a belief that because we opened the Comic-Con Museum here [in San Diego] and we have always had the show here, that we are anchored to San Diego and could never leave. Well, we don't want to leave, but we've run conventions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose, and they were very successful. I think there

Mikko Ketovuori is the author of Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society. I had the opportunity to read the original Finnish Language version and the recently published English copy is updated to current events and just as thought provoking. https://lnkd.in/gx7eq9hG I, like many others, saw the drivers of our happiness or dissatisfaction as being events that corralled social mood. Socionomics disagrees and sees that it is social mood that creates the events. These are often multi-year cycles. My own interpretation is that just as societies look to break away from the past, the past, harking back to traditional ‘values’, grabs our attention; we long for things that were core to the lives of our parents and grandparents. One example of this is the 2012 London Olympics. A time of welcome, of reaching out. Four years later the UK voted to leave the EU, the fear of the ‘other’ overwhelming our openness. Why does Russia repeat, again and again, border expansion? Fear of the other along with a whimsical belief that the world should bow to its power. Markets do the same. House prices, share prices, commodities. Part of Mikko’s thesis dovetails with the works of Robert Prechter and his firm, Elliott Wave International - Global Market Analysts will be joining Mikko in London on April 24th. If you’re interested in joining us please do come back to me.

Comic-Con May Leave San Diego Due To Price Gouging: "For 55 years, San Diego Comic-Con has been offering fans and aficionados of all things comic and movie related a place to meet, gawk, show off, and in general bask in their geekery," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "That may be coming to an end. Due to hotels' price gouging the cost of rooms, Comic-Con may be moving." Forbes reports: "We would never want to leave, but if push came to shove and it became untenable for us, it's something that we would certainly have to look into," said David Glanzer, Chief Communication and Strategy Officer for Comic-Con International, the nonprofit group that puts on SDCC and WonderCon, in a phone interview Monday. "As event planners, we're always contacted by different cities and it would be reckless for us to not at least acknowledge that." Asked if the show was locked in to San Diego for 2025, Glanzer responded, "2025 is when our contract expires, unless something happens before the convention this year. And if so, I imagine we would make an announcement during the show." The sticking point for the Convention is the behavior of some of the hotels in the area. For decades, SDCC has negotiated block rates for rooms that they offer to out-of-town attendees, exhibitors, professionals and guests at a discount. Typically, the more deluxe hotels within walking distance of the convention center run $275-335/night, and ones further out can be had for as low as $215 through the Con's hotel site for registered attendees. Competition for rooms in the desirable hotels has become so intense that the day the reservations open has become known as "Hotelocapylse." Recently, Glanzer said some hotels have been making fewer and fewer rooms available in the blocks, knowing they can charge top dollar on the open market. Rates for non-block rooms during Comic-Con weekend at some of the bigger hotels can go for two or three times the ordinary high season rate, and even smaller hotels and Airbnbs in the area charge significantly more to take advantage of the peak demand. Now that opportunistic behavior is threatening to kill the golden goose that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars into the city in a single week. "If attendees opt not to come because they can't afford to stay at a hotel here, they'll go to another convention," said Glanzer. "And if that starts to happen, the studios won't be able to make as big an impact, and it becomes a downward spiral that no one wants to go down. If we can't accommodate the people who want to attend the show then we're in a pretty bad situation." "I think there is a belief that because we opened the Comic-Con Museum here [in San Diego] and we have always had the show here, that we are anchored to San Diego and could never leave. Well, we don't want to leave, but we've run conventions in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Jose, and they were very successful. I think there

Here's more on how the execs behind the new downtown Orlando event venue plan to differentiate it — and what other real estate opportunities may be available at the space.

Happy New Year! 🌟2024 is starting with a bang with $81.9M+ in event-driven spending this January, and that’s just for the top 5 cities across the US! 5️⃣ First on the list is Bakersfield, CA where local spending is expected to surge by $792,037 due to sports matchups including AHL Bakersfield Condors vs Abbotsford Canucks 🏒 4️⃣ Next up is Wichita, KS with a spending surge of $4,332,321 as a result of sports events combined with major expos such as the Wichita Bridal Expo 💍👰🏻 3️⃣ Chandler, AZ starts the year off strong with a demand surge of $9,629,768 spanning across two weeks due to overlapping shows and festivals including the Chandler International Film Festival 🎥🍿 2️⃣ Sacramento, CA is our runner up this month with a demand surge of $13,279,289 in local spending due to attractions such as Monster Jam Sacramento and the Sacramento Chocolate Salon 2024 during the last week of the month 🍫🎉 1️⃣ Tampa, FL stays in demand surge territory for most of the month with a whopping $53,897,955 in event-driven spending over three weeks. The Gasparilla Pirate Festival alone accounts for most of this, bringing together 300,000 attendees who are predicted to spend $24.7M+ in just one day! 🏴☠️ Discover these incredible events and more with your free copy of the January 2024 Demand Surge Report! 📊 #predictiveanalytics #predictivedata #localevents

Durham has been on the move for the past 20+ years, since I did my first convention center expansion study there. Now, the city is truly exploding, especially downtown. We completed our portion of the Destination Durham Placemaking Plan last year, then dug into a specific convention center expansion study. What is likely obvious to most who know the small facility (which performs exceedingly well, making an operating profit, thanks to OVG's expert management) cannot be appropriately expanded onsite. What is needed is a new, larger site that can accommodate a much larger and more efficiently designed facility that is still walkable to all the great amenities downtown, with an attached headquarters hotel. While Durham does not like to be compared to any city, as they are their own unique authentic place, Nashville is a comparison situation regarding the new site opportunity for a convention center. Nashville's outdated center was in the middle of downtown and had no good options for expansion, just like Durham. So the new Music City Center was developed on the south side of downtown. The results for them have been dramatic, as the second most popular convention destination according to Cvent. Site is not the only consideration or reason for success or failure, as is clear in Nashville. Many other great factors played a role in their ascent to the top of the heap. But having that excellent facility in the right place, with the right facilities and amenities and HQ hotel, allowed that leg of the visitor economy stool to thrive. I truly believe that Durham can thrive in the group event business, which will benefit local residents and businesses for generations. https://lnkd.in/gAzEWMJP