Lost Opportunities Or Just Bluster From Convention Center Boosters?
That’s my question after reading the interim report looking at whether it is time to put down big money for an expansion of the six year old Boston Convention & Exhibition Center.
If nothing else, the preliminary report, put together by a blue ribbon panel of business, labor and civic leaders, provides a road map for the likely arguments to be used to support an expansion recommendation.
Citing presentations by industry experts, the report notes the city’s new convention hall lost 65 potential bookings since January 2009 because of a dearth of space. That adds up to 1 million lost hotel nights and $480 million in potential spending by conventioneers that didn’t happen as well.
More troubling, the Biotechnology Industry Convention, or BIO show, has warned it will not be coming back after 2012 if the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority fails to expand its showcase meeting hall.
And a dearth of hotels around the new convention complex is also a major issue, according to the report.
In fact, some events spend as much as $1 million per event to shuttle conventioneers from Back Bay hotels to the South Boston center, according to the panel’s preliminary findings.
All sounds pretty dire, right? The only problem is that the history of convention center construction and expansion in Boston is chock full of examples of misleading facts and figures marshaled to support ever larger projects.
The most notorious example was the rosy estimates cooked up in the 1990s to back up the construction of the new South Boston hall – and which have yet to met.
That push also included some dire warnings – the pending loss of the then popular Macworld show amid concerns that Boston was losing business since it had only the smaller Hynes center as a gathering spot for conventions.
That’s not to say the numbers about lost shows are wrong. But there is reason to be wary as well.