Conventions to bring a million hotel room nights

New conventions booked during the last fiscal year will eventually lead to more than 1 million hotel-room nights reserved throughout San Diego, the first time that’s happened in nearly a decade.

Credit Comic-Con International with helping boost convention bookings secured by the San Diego Tourism Authority’s sales team. Just days before the start of this year’s pop culture gathering, the city announced that it had reached a two-year deal with organizers to hold the yearly event at the San Diego Convention Center through 2018. Its current contract was due to expire after 2016.

In all, 57 conventions were booked for dates out to the year 2033, accounting for a total of 1,002,688 hotel room nights, the Tourism Authority reported on Wednesday. With those secured bookings, the agency easily surpassed its yearly goal of 860,000 room nights, marking the first time it has done so since it began overseeing bookings in 2012 for larger, citywide conventions at the center.

During the two previous years, the Tourism Authority fell short, having booked 813,662 room nights during the 2013 fiscal year and 816,188 the following year, the equivalent of meeting 95 percent of its annual goal.

Each year, the agency’s sales force works to land future conventions, and its annual performance is measured by the number of hotel room nights associated with those new contracts.

Tourism Authority CEO Joe Terzi pointed out that even without the 120,000 future room nights connected to Comic-Con, his sales force would have met its annual goal. Among the key conventions booked this past year are the Society for Human Resource Management in 2020 and the American Association for Cancer Research for the years 2029 and 2032.

City and tourism leaders had hoped to secure even more conventions once a planned expansion of the bayfront center was completed, but the $520 million project fell through after a judge ruled that the financing plan was unconstitutional.

“During the last few years, we stayed away from certain key dates in the future when we were still expecting the center expansion,” Terzi explained. “Once we knew more about what was happening, we said, let’s behave like there isn’t going to be an expansion, and that opened up some more opportunities. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Beginning in 2012, the Tourism Authority took over long-term bookings at the center after the San Diego City Council agreed to shift the duties from the Convention Center Corp., which now is responsible for booking nearer-term meetings and trade shows.

That separation of duties was among a number of issues addressed in a recent San Diego County Grand Jury report, which recommended that an independent review of the dual booking system be undertaken before the current four-year agreement expires next year.

Convention Center Corp. CEO Carol Wallace has made no secret of her dissatisfaction with the arrangement.

“I have concerns about the performance of the Tourism Authority over the term of the contract,” Wallace said during a Convention Center Corp. board meeting last month. “I think it does deserve an outside look.”

A board committee is currently considering whether a consultant should be hired to evaluate the work done under the contract and whether it should be extended, based on the Tourism Authority’s performance, said convention center spokesman Steve Johnson.

Terzi feels strongly that the Tourism Authority should continue to oversee the marketing of the center.

“It clearly is the model that exists in the industry,” he said. “Selling and marketing the center is different from operating it, and we already have the responsibility for selling and marketing the whole destination of San Diego.”