Fast Company

In sports, an athlete enters the hall of fame for establishing records and making an indelible impact on the game. For Charlotte's meetings and tourism, the hall of fame was the impact on a record month in May, when the Queen City reaped $403 million.

The official shrine of America's favorite motorsport, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, made its long-awaited debut, adjacent to the Charlotte Convention Center, and drew 10,000 visitors in its opening week. In its first 20 days, the facility, which has the 40,000-sf Crown Ballroom and a 32,000-sf outdoor event space, generated $10 million in revenue. On back-to-back weekends, it entertained fans in town for the NASCAR All-Star Race and inaugural induction, and then the Coca-Cola 600 and Food Lion Speed Street, the U.S.'s largest free outdoor motorsport-related festival.

That same month, 72,000 attendees participated in the National Rifle Association's Annual Meetings & Exhibits convention, which, according to Charlotte Regional Visitors Association CEO Tim Newman, had its most successful fundraising event ever using the Hall of Fame and new ballroom. The NRA group was the largest that Charlotte ever hosted.

"We hope every month is like this," Newman says. "We're thankful and we've proven we are able to produce major events, one right after another."

Charlotte's best month ever was a microcosm of an upward trend in the city's meetings pace of late, as leads and bookings have picked up in the last four to six months, Newman remarks. The city has netted at least two citywide conventions for each of the next five years and is in talks with groups from "a variety of sectors now interested in us because of our new infrastructure," he notes. "We're becoming an energy-sector hub."

Attracting groups is the Crown Ballroom, connected to the convention center by a skyway. They can convene for prefunctions in the Hall of Fame's Great Hall before heading over to the columnfree ballroom, which seats 2,400 for banquets or holds 4,200 theater-style.

Newman's next wish? "We'd like to see a 500- to 700-room hotel complement our new capacity," he says, pointing out that there are several sites next to the Hall of Fame suitable for a privately funded lodging project.

Raleigh

Up north, the nearly two-year-old Raleigh Convention Center, with a 150,000-square-foot exhibit hall and a 32,617-square-foot ballroom, is gaining momentum as the city's convention bureau applies a focused pursuit of groups of 400 to 800 room nights. "We have to stay strategic," says Loren Gold, executive vice president of the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau. "We can't spend time chasing groups that don't fit us; there's too much competition out there."

Gold notes that its convention business is up 20 percent, though some groups have had up to 15 percent attendance dips because of the economy. The LEED-certified, three-story convention center can be set up to host and "keep apart" two to three smaller groups at once, he says.

With half of Raleigh's convention and trade show market being state and regional groups—plenty of them academic, pharmaceutical, and tech-industry groups from the Research Triangle Park area—Gold wants to mine more small national and even international meetings. He also wants to go after sports business, especially collegiate games and events.

Bolstering the city's capabilities is the brand-new, 5,500-seat Downtown Raleigh Amphitheater, which opened behind the convention center last month. The GRCVB wants to sell it as an extension of the convention facility to attract a greater variety of groups, including performing arts organizations.

Another, even bigger development is the directly connected 400-room Marriott City Center that opened last fall to support convention group lodging requirements. The hotel has a fullservice Italian restaurant, upscale rooms with 37-inch flatscreen TVs, and 15,000 square feet of event space, and works along with the 353-room Sheraton Raleigh Hotel a block away. Meanwhile, Fayetteville St., the main downtown corridor, reopened to allow attendees direct walking access to the area's museums and the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts.

Gold says that with the new assets in place, the National Hockey League finally agreed to bring its 2011 All-Star Game and festivities to Raleigh. The city and the league have been in negotiations for years to locate the event there. Gold expects it will generate cachet with sports event organizers.

Hilton Head

Along the South Carolina coast, the high-end destination of Hilton Head Island, known for its beaches and golf, continues to recover from the economy and luxury backlash. Jack Reed, director of sales for the Hilton Head Island Visitor and Convention Bureau, says the group market this year remains challenging, but 2011 is "ahead of pace." Says Reed, "There's still a lot of uncertainty, and businesses, especially financial, are holding off meetings. But everyone feels better about next year."

Aiming to help meeting and incentive groups take the onus off of using a resort locale, the bureau has introduced a turnkey corporate social responsibility program, called the Hilton Head Island Difference, providing two-hour, fourhour, or full-day projects. "The thinking behind [it] was to counterbalance the perception issue" with some positive publicity, says Reed.

The organization and its partners provide transportation to and from the job site, work supplies, boxed lunches, and T-shirts co-branded with the client and the charity. The first client to employ the program will be a 75-attendee association group in mid-August. "We've road-tested the program a bit with a planners familiarization group in April," notes Reed. "We got some great feedback."

Originally published July 1, 2010

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