Visit Austin Shares Three-Part Strategy to Support Hotels During Convention Center Closure

Austin, TX – Aiding the Hospitality Industry Amidst Convention Center Closure

On Monday, March 18, 2024, Visit Austin, the city’s tourism organization, unveiled its robust strategy to sustain the local hotel and convention industry during the prolonged four-year closure of the Austin Convention Center for major reconstruction. This strategy centers around aggressive city marketing to attract both new and returning visitors.

The organization is responsible for bolstering business for the over 15,000 downtown hotel rooms that would be hit directly by the convention center reconstruction starting next year. As a result, ensuring these businesses’ survival throughout the construction period is a pressing priority.

Diversified Strategy to Support Hotels

The strategy involves widespread communication of the available meeting and presentation spaces in the city other than the convention center. This includes spaces within hotels themselves, and facilities such as the Palmer Events Center and Austin City Limits Live.

Another significant aspect of Visit Austin’s strategy is prioritizing the booking of sports business with the potential to become yearly events and activities that will continue even after the convention center reopens in 2030.

Visit Austin is adopting a “campus-style” approach to scatter larger bookings amongst clusters of downtown hotels. This strategy aims to layer different events into the same groups of hotels to achieve the density necessary in multiple locations to maintain steady nightly room rates. This effort is anticipated to prevent hotels from having to offer heavy discounts to attract fewer business travelers or individual tourists.

Converting Business Visits into Tourism

Addressing a query on the goal of adding more nights to business guests’ stays, Visit Austin’s President and CEO, Tom Noonan, said that increased marketing of the city’s music, culinary, and recreation offerings will play an integral role.

He said, “You want to book a convention here because they become tourists. … If you’re a nurse here for the nursing convention, you’re gonna turn a couple more days into vacation time.” This indicates that conventioneers contribute to tourism statistics as well, showcasing the multifaceted benefits of hosting conventions in the city.

A Visitor Center on the Horizon

During the presentation, Noonan also revealed that the Austin Visitor Center, disturbed by the convention center’s reconstruction, will relocate to a new address on Fifth Street just east of Congress Avenue. This move is planned for February, and the new location is the Phillips Building property, a late-19th-century building of approximately 7,500 square feet that initially served as a Studebaker automobile dealership.

Securing the Future of the Tourism Industry

As part of the strategy for supporting the local hotel industry during the convention center’s extended closure, Visit Austin is also ensuring the necessary funding for increased marketing efforts. Noonan updated on the progress of securing signatures from local hoteliers for the Tourism Public Improvement District, a 2 percent tax on room nights, which has received preliminary approval from the City Council.

By early May, the agreement should have all required signatures in place, allowing the necessary funds to be available by the start of the city’s next budget cycle in October. The new tax will not only aid marketing efforts but also provide some much-needed funding for services assisting the city’s homeless population.

This comprehensive and multilevel strategy presented by Visit Austin gives the local hotel industry a glimmer of hope amid potentially challenging times ahead due to the impending closure of a significant part of the city’s convention infrastructure.