Statesville Convention and Visitors Bureau Director Libba Barrineau and Statesville Civic Center director Kenny Roberts are preparing to showcase the city's meeting sites and services.
It's the first time the SCVB has attended the trade show cooperatively with the civic center, Barrineau said.
But she doesn't expect to walk away from the trade show with a list of bookings for the civic center.
"The thing you want to do is build relationships and awareness," she said. "We can look at the meetings that the groups are targeting. We will know what groups to target and what we can put in place."
Planners are looking for cost-effective ways to hold meetings, Barrineau said. They want a location where they can find an appropriate amount of meeting space and sleeping rooms.
Statesville can fit a niche for smaller conferences that cities like Atlanta or Washington, D.C., can't fill. Barrineau said U.S. Interstates 77 and 40 give attendees easy access planners also look for.
"For a town our size, I feel most convention-goers spend around $160 per day during their stay," she said. "So this is a lucrative market to solicit."
Barrineau said a big concern for meeting planners is the amount of square footage. A lot of conventions have a three-room format, with one room reserved for a meal, a seminar in another and a trade show in the third.
The combined space between the Holiday Inn Statesville, Statesville Civic Center, the new Courtyard by Marriott, the Hampton Inn and Glutton's Restaurant, gives Statesville a little more than 22,000 square feet, she said.
Once all the new hotels are built, Statesville will have 1,504 sleeping rooms, putting it in a prime position to go after the convention market, Barrineau said.
Roberts said the civic center has hosted several conventions in the past.
"The more groups we can get in, the more revenue we can produce to match up with our funding," Roberts said.
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