When the Olympic Games descended on Atlanta in 1996, the city's convention business jumped ship. It seemed no one wanted to face the congestion, or the pre-Games construction.
Sound familiar?
The Salt Lake Convention and Visitors Bureau hopes it learned from Atlanta's Olympic adventure and is better prepared in 2002.
"Based on Atlanta's experience, we knew that 2001 and 2002 could be very soft convention years, because people think an Olympic city is a congested, construction zone," said Dianne Binger, senior vice president of convention sales and marketing.
So, Binger said, the Salt Lake bureau concentrated its efforts on building business. To wit, the agency this week released its annual report in conjunction with its annual meeting Thursday, announcing a record-setting year in 2000 in terms of booking future business.
The bureau booked 672,542 hotel room nights in 2000 for future years, a 12 percent increase over 1999. Year 2000 bookings will result in $455 million worth of economic impact in visitor spending for Salt Lake County, the report estimated.
Agency spokesman Jason Mathis attributed the growth to three factors: the Salt Palace renovations, the new South Towne Exposition Center in Sandy, and new upscale hotels like the Grand America Hotel and the Hotel Monaco.
"Because of the luxury hotels opening up, we're able to go after things now that we weren't upscale enough to go after in the past," Mathis said.
Still, the downtown area will face some unavoidable challenges in the coming months, he said.
As Atlanta's Georgia World Congress Center did in 1996, the Salt Palace will host the media for the 2002 Winter Games. The building will begin a phased-in transition in August, which Mathis said will limit the bureau's ability to book citywide conventions downtown.
Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau spokesman Bill Howard said that city lost the lucrative convention circuit prior to and during the Games because of the media occupation.
"The availability of our major convention facility was taken away from us for the majority of the spring and summer before the Olympics," Howard said. "We ended up diverting the conventions away from the city and lost the traditional visitors in exchange for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to host the Games."
Rather than divert visitors from Utah, Mathis said the Salt Lake bureau hopes to capitalize on Olympic-related improvements — new hotels, more convenient transportation through light rail and the new freeway system, and the city's effort to revitalize downtown — to attract new conventions.
"We'd really like the Olympics to be a way to leverage our efforts," he said. "We want to let people know that if we can host the Games, we can definitely host your convention."
So far, Binger said 21 citywide conventions are scheduled after the Games end in March 2002.
And despite its early losses, Howard said Atlanta is better off because it hosted the Games.
"Our investment was $1.6 billion," he said. "The return on that investment, the total economic impact, was $5 billion. From a pure business standpoint, the Games is good business. I think it creates a global market in terms of tourism and created a vast new global audience for us."
Howard said Atlanta credits the Games with a startling increase in international tourism. In 1996, the number of international flights terminating in Atlanta totaled 9,000, he said. This year, 24,000 are expected.
Mathis hopes the same thing happens in Salt Lake City.
"If, during the Olympics, people find they have a good time, they'll be more inclined to come back in the future," he said. "We're hoping that generates future business for the Salt Lake area."
E-mail: jnii@desnews.com