|
|
|
Vital Signs
New Haven tourism forecast: increasingly sunny, but clouds
on horizon
|
Business New Haven
8/10/98
By: Susan Banfield
|
Along with the return of warm weather, May saw two new conferences come to New Haven.
The Correctional Education Association brought about 500 principals and teachers who work in New England correctional institutions to the Elm City. The other was a first-time event: the Conference on Women's Health & Fitness, sponsored by Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale University.
More new events are scheduled for future months. The New England Pop Warner Football & Cheerleading Championships will be held at Veterans Memorial Coliseum and Southern Connecticut State University in November. Also soon to start is a 30-date motor-coach tour for visitors from England. New Haven was chosen because the tour operator wanted to stop in a city that was of manageable size, in a country setting, yet with nighttime offerings as well. There are still more new bookings in the offing - signs that the city's ability to attract visitors may be at the beginning of an upswing.
New Haven has distinct advantages as a choice for both business and leisure travelers. It has obvious geographic appeal athwart the main routes between Boston and New York at the crossroads of I-95 and I-91. It has the draw of a world-class university and numerous other cultural offerings. And the charms of rural New England are but a short drive out of town.
Yet despite these advantages, New Haven has historically been a real underachiever in the competition for tourism dollars.
Just what accounts for new movement in a more positive direction? There are several factors, all working together. It is hard to say just what deserves the most credit.
Certainly a key ingredient in the mix is the presence of the nearly-complete Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale, the city's first major hotel and conference center.
“The support of the Omni was very important to them,” says Susan Adler, Yale's director of conference services, about organizers of the Conference of Women's Health & Fitness that was held here in May. “The Omni worked with us very, very well on this.”
The Omni was likewise a key factor in attracting the Correctional Education Association. Most event guests were lodged there, and the group's luncheon took place there as well.
“More people are offering to host conferences as a result of the Omni [and] the New Haven Hotel,” Adler adds.
“We've been very unsuccessful in competing with other communities without a flagship hotel historically,” says Michael Schaffer, chairman of the Greater New Haven Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB). “The Omni was a fabulous renovation and is the flagship hotel for downtown.”
Before 1998, the only major space New Haven had to offer as a convention or conference site was aging New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
With 60,000 square feet of floor space and a limited capacity to break this down into smaller spaces, the Coliseum has been able to attract only a limited number of conferences. Most prefer a smaller facility with more break-out space.
The Coliseum does host an annual four-weekend Jehovah's Witnesses convention, an auto expo and a bridal fair, but not a lot more. The Omni, by contrast, offers 22,000 square feet of meeting space, which can be broken down dozens of ways into rooms with a wide variety of sizes. Even the Coliseum's director of marketing, Jill Powers, acknowledges, “The Omni is an untapped resource; we should be working more with them.”
In addition to the Omni, the New Haven Hotel (née the New Haven Medical Hotel) will also soon unveil a major conference facility to help lure business meetings to the city. The hotel recently purchased the old United Illuminating Co. building that abuts it, and plans to convert most of the newly acquired space into a 32,000-square-foot conference facility, complete with a 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot ballroom and a state-of-the-art business center.
As was the case with the Omni, “We want to keep the Old World charm the building has to offer,” says New Haven Hotel General Manager Steve Nigro. Thus the hotel has retained an architectural firm (Coopercarry Hospitality of Atlanta) that specializes in conference centers, and Nigro estimates that the new facility will be open for business within a year. Already, “We have had a lot of inquiries,” he says.
While the availability of new hotel and conference facilities has been a decided help in attracting new business to New Haven, the newly pro-active role of the local CVB cannot be overlooked.
Under the new leadership of Executive Director Karolyn Kirchgesler, the CVB recently conducted a retreat in which the bureau conducted an extensive self-analysis, and set new goals for itself. “I feel we've given the organization new vibrancy and new focus,” says board chairman Schaffer.
Some of the changes that came out of the retreat included a decision to focus on increasing overnight stays in local hotels, augmenting the bureau's sales forces (two new people were added), and a major investment in a new trade booth that will enable the city to make more effective presentations at trade shows.
The newly energized sales team helped to land the Pop Warner championships and the motorcoach (read: bus) tours. Schaffer reports that as a direct result of the new booth, New Haven was named one of the country's top ten cities at the annual All-America Cities competition earlier this year in Mobile, Ala. This will be a real plus when trying to sell New Haven to tour operators, Schaffer says. “People like to visit cities that are exciting, on the up-and-up.”
As part of an effort to be more involved in coordinating local efforts to attract tourism business, the CVB also recently moved its headquarters from Long Wharf to a new downtown location at 59 Elm Street. It also changed its by-laws to make the executive directors and presidents of the chambers of commerce of the 15 towns the bureau serves ex officio members of the CVB board.
In addition, the CVB develops tourist guides, which it distributes throughout the region, and works with other CVBs to develop tour packages - for example the Freedom Trail, based around the Amistad and created jointly with the Mystic and Hartford CVBs.
All told, the Convention and Visitors' Bureau helped to bring 23 conventions, conferences or seminars to New Haven in 1997 and 1998, for a total of more than 6,200 visitors to the city. During roughly the same period, hotel revenues increased 13 percent.
Other members of the local “tourism community” have already noticed a change in the CVB. “It is dramatic to see how much they've been doing,” says Omni General Manager Linda Libby. “I'm very impressed with the amount of change and the willingness to make change.”
Libby worked in a number of large cities before coming to New Haven - Washington, D.C., Charlotte, Cincinnati, San Mateo, Calif. - and always worked closely with the local CVB. Often, she says, these local bureaus were “very resistant to change.”
Steve Nigro has likewise been impressed with the revamped bureau. “I think they're doing a very good job,” he says. In particular, he is grateful for the extensive technical advice he has received in the planning of the New Haven Hotel addition. “This is what businesses need.”
A third player in the effort to better market New Haven has been Yale University.
“Yale is our single most important draw in this region,” says Schaffer. “When we're going to national trade shows, the thing that brings people to our booth is the university. It's our calling card.”
Yale's Department of Conference Services works actively to bring educational programs to the university, to assist Yale people in organizing meetings, and to bring outside conferences to town, making use of university facilities.
Director Susan Adler reports that sales efforts have definitely been more successful since the advent of the Omni. In addition to the Conference on Women's Health & Fitness, Adler reports that two other new conferences have been booked for 1999, and that the number of meetings held at Yale is also on the rise.
“Yale is also changing in terms of the marketing of its museums,” says Schaffer, speaking of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. “I think there has been a substantial change in the way the university sees museums - as community resources.”
The Peabody, Schaffer says, has for years been very effective at drawing visitors. More recently, the British Art Center has also boosted efforts to publicize its exhibits.
Although the fruits of these efforts are not currently in evidence, as the museum is all but shut down for renovations, in 1997 total attendance was 95,225, with 40 percent of visitors coming from outside Connecticut, and 20 percent from abroad. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent to advertise exhibitions in the New York Times, Hartford Courant and Boston Globe, as well as in local media. The BAC's advertising efforts are on a par with those of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, perhaps the state's premier museum.
Not everyone, however, is pleased with the way in which the publicly funded tourism business is being conducted. During the most recent legislative session, legislation was proposed to revamp the way in which the state's tourism districts and convention and visitors bureaus are organized and funded.
A redrawing of district lines was proposed: Trumbull, for example, with its busy Marriott, would be removed from the greater New Haven district and reassigned to Fairfield County. Also proposed was a substantial increase in the proportion of the state hotel room occupancy tax allocated to statewide tourism promotions, and elimination of the percentages of these taxes allocated to local tourism organizations.
The New Haven CVB currently gets about 1.5 percent of the tax from New Haven hotels, for an annual budget of $750,000. Under the proposed legislation, the local CVB, as well as the other ten tourism districts in the state, would have to compete for state grant money.
Although the legislation died in the commerce committee, and it is uncertain whether it will be brought up again in the 1998-99 legislative session, there is at least some sentiment that local efforts to bring visitors to New Haven, while beginning to improve, must still prove themselves.
It is, of course, everyone's hope that the combined efforts of the re-energized CVB, the city's hotels and Yale will rise to the occasion and carve out for New Haven the niche in the tourism market the city has so long sought.
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
