Spending for a new convention-center hotel not enough for you? Then you’ll love another upcoming push by the visitor/convention bureau: expanding the convention center itself–again–by another 300,000 square feet. That tidbit’s revealed in D CEO magazine’s April cover story, a hard look at how effective head honcho Phillip J. Jones has been luring business meetings for the Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau. Jones supporters like to say the DCVB’s on the right track, with hundreds of millions of dollars in projected future “room nights” stretching out to 2017–if we’ll just build that convention-center hotel. But skeptics including restaurateur Al Biernat say Jones is a “tourism” man lacking the inclination or the skill to curry large-scale convention biz. One fact they point to: hotel stays by Dallas conventioneers fell 25 percent between 2002 and 2008. The April D CEO hits Borders and Barnes & Noble newsstands later this week.
2 comments
AL Biernat should know what’s what, especially as his bottom line is factual, actual dollars spent. Phillip Jones appears to be in cohoots with our beloved mayor, dealing in smoke and mirrors accounting and projection based speculations, fuelling an agenda that has no basis in what’s best for the people of Dallas.
As a property tax payer, I would like to see some of the dollar figures of actual money spent with all of these supposed conventions and meetings that have come in since Jones has been in position. I doubt any of them would support an increase in the size of the convention center. Dallas doesn’t seem to be able to attract the conventions they dream of and I think the reasons why are well beyond the realms of understanding by the mayor or his bud at DCVB, who are so enamored of pushing through their own hidden agendas.
“hotel stays by Dallas conventioneers fell 25 percent between 2002 and 2008“– that’s certainly a figure you don’t see Leppert trotting out everyday. This planned hotel is going to be even more of a fiasco than I originally thought.