Baltimore Area Convention

More than 65,200 people attended conventions in Baltimore in the second quarter of the city's fiscal year, utilizing nearly 50,000 hotel rooms and spending $64.2 million, the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association said today. BACVA President and Chief Executive Leslie R. Doggett said in a report released today that 49,581 hotel rooms were rented by the 65,213 people who attended conventions in the region between October and December of last year, the second three months of fiscal year 2004.

Given intense competition in the meetings industry, the head of the city's convention bureau is looking to leisure travel as Baltimore's ticket to growth in the hospitality sector. Leslie R. Doggett, president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association, plans to focus on converting the city's many day-trippers into overnight guests. "I can assure you I will fight for our share [of conventions]," Doggett said yesterday during two town hall forums at the Pier Five Hotel, which attracted nearly 150 people.

Leslie R. Doggett plans to do something this year that the city's convention bureau has never done before. She will sit down with officials at the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts and create a "Top 10" list - a wish list of events and groups that the city would like to entertain over the next five years. "I'd like to see us come up with some signature events to really brand the city," said Doggett, who became president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association last summer.

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Baltimore has landed its biggest convention ever - the National Baptist Convention USA Inc. Congress of Christian Education, which is expected to bring 50,000 people - more than the capacity of Camden Yards - to the city for a week in 2006. The city won out over Detroit in its bid for the meeting, scheduled for June 18-24, the city's convention bureau announced yesterday. The group is expected to require more than 25,000 hotel rooms and generate $41 million in direct spending. "It's a great day for Baltimore," said Leslie R. Doggett, the new president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association.

This morning a small group of business leaders is to meet behind closed doors in the offices of Baltimore Development Corp. to evaluate proposals for a convention headquarters hotel for the city. Four hours have been set aside for the group to ask questions and debate the bids from three developers for a hotel, with at least 750 rooms, to be built on two vacant blocks just west of the Baltimore Convention Center and north of Oriole Park at Camden Yards. One of the development teams also proposed an alternative site in which the hotel would rise on a parking lot on Conway Street just west of the Sheraton Inner Harbor.

THE STAKES are high. A hand-picked group of panelists is scheduled to meet tomorrow to recommend which one of three developers should build a headquarters hotel near the woefully underused Baltimore Convention Center. That's not all. The panelists also will advise the Baltimore Development Corp. board and Mayor Martin O'Malley on whether taxpayers ought to assume ownership of the hotel, which is likely to carry a $200 million price tag. These recommendations are so fundamentally important that they ought to be made in public.

Baltimore's convention business dipped in the most recent fiscal year to its lowest level since the size of the city's convention center was tripled in 1997, according to statistics released this week. Convention-related hotel bookings also slumped to two-thirds the budgeted level in the fiscal year ended June 30, the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association reported. Months of turmoil at the city's convention and visitors bureau - while its operation underwent a review that led to its president's ouster - along with a national convention travel slump contributed to the miserable showing, industry officials said.

Dan M. Lincoln, the Baltimore convention bureau's senior vice president of sales and marketing, said yesterday that he will step down from that position next month to pursue other interests. Lincoln's departure, effective Oct. 3, will come several weeks after Leslie R. Doggett took over as the new president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association. The organization has been struggling with sagging convention sales and internal turmoil after a highly critical outside evaluation and the ouster of the association's former chief executive, Carroll R. Armstrong.

Baltimore's convention and visitors bureau has landed a prestigious convention of meeting planners - people who will influence the locations of meetings across the nation for years to come. The Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association called it a coup. The American Society of Association Executives said the decision to move its 2004 winter meeting to Baltimore resulted largely from lack of space in the Washington Convention Center in February. Baltimore officials were excited about the chance to showcase the city to such an influential group.