This change may soon bring more conventions — and more visitors — to the Boise area
The Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau wants the city to play host to more big conferences and conventions.
Those types of meetings help the local economy as they bring new visitors to the city. Attendees eat in local restaurants and shop downtown, racking up sometimes thousands of nights in total hotel stays.
The problem? Boise doesn’t have many big hotels, meaning that when meeting planners — the people who scope out cities and decide where to hold large events — look at Boise, they must consider multiple hotel contracts. That requires keeping track of more deadlines and specific terms and conditions for each hotel. That’s a headache.
And that means Boise sometimes loses out on large events to cities like Spokane, Reno and San Diego. According to data from the bureau, more than 11% of planners who chose other cities over Boise mention that Boise had too many hotels to work with when other cities could host an event in just one.
“In some of the communities we’ve lost out to, it’s because there, everything will fit under one roof,” Carrie Westergard, executive director of the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in a phone interview. “We can fit all the attendees in the Boise Centre, but a conference for 1,500 people might have to utilize up to 10 or 12 hotels.”
So the bureau is considering a novel idea: A single, universal contract for all the hotels a convention may need to use. The bureau is working with several hotels to develop the idea, including both locally owned hotels and chains.
Vicki Carley, regional director of sales for The Grove Hotel, said she considered a universal contract to make Boise competitive with cities with larger hotels. The Grove, for example, is one of the largest in the city with 250 rooms. But it alone wouldn’t be able to house the sometimes thousands of guests a convention could bring.
“The whole city benefits in allowing larger conferences to come here, even the outlying hotels not directly downtown,” Carley said.
One of the first places to introduce a master contract was Madison, Wisconsin. Madison’s visitors bureau, called Destination Madison, rolled out “One City One Contract” in 2019.
Madison often found itself having to split up attendees of larger gatherings between multiple spaces, similar to Boise. The Wisconsin capital is up against cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Des Moines, said Rob Gard, the director of PR and communications for Destination Madison. After Madison introduced the contract, it helped people “pay attention who otherwise might not,” he said.
“You want to reduce the barriers and make something more attractive,” Gard said. Already, two groups have taken advantage of Madison’s contract.
Boise hopes to start marketing its own contract in the next two months, Westergard said.
“It’s a good step for the region and the whole community,” Westergard said.
.jpg)