DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM The $350 million Hawaii Convention Center is credited with spurring interest in the islands as a place to hold corporate meetings and conventions. Two workers moved barricades into the street prior to the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank at the convention center in May last year.

Hawaii ranked
high as business
meeting location

A biennial poll lifts the state from
11th to second in the country

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By Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.com

Hawaii has jumped to rank second in the nation, behind San Diego, as a place to hold meetings, according to a new poll conducted by an independent polling team, the national firms of Economic Research Associates and Gerald Murphy & Associates.

Metropoll, conducted every two years to ask meetings planners and decision-makers how they feel about 40 different meeting and convention destinations, ranked Hawaii 11th in its 1999 study and 17th in the 1997 study.

That means a big leap forward has taken place, officials of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Hawaii Convention Center told a news conference yesterday.

Officials of the Oahu and Neighbor Island visitors bureaus and of the major hotel chains joined the HVCB and convention center leaders at the session, which was aimed mainly at journalists from national meeting and convention trade publications.

The overall message was that Hawaii is better than ever as a meeting destination because of the presence of the $350 million convention center and hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent on improving Waikiki and resorts around the state.

Tony Vericella, HVCB president and chief executive officer, said the high Metropoll ranking for Hawaii was "a tremendous vote of confidence by the national meetings industry."

He said Hawaii needs to increase "the quality of visitors rather than the quantity of visitors," and meetings, conventions and corporate incentive trips do that because they attract higher spenders than the purely leisure trade.

Vericella said the hope is that such activities will produce one-third of total Hawaii visitor expenditures within five years.

Sandra Moreno, head of the meetings, conventions and incentives division of the HVCB, said meeting visitors now account for about 12 percent of the visitor head count and 24 percent of visitor spending.

From 1997 to 2000, the business grew by 38 percent, she said.

Hotel improvements have taken place throughout the state, the officials said. Many hotels now have highly developed technology, such as teleconferencing and Internet services.

With the reopening next month of Kaluakoi resort on Molokai, now managed by Sheraton, there will be meetings facilities on all six islands, industry representatives said.

The trade publication representatives came to Hawaii to attend the 2002 Professional Education Conference of Meeting Professionals International.

Visitor industry officials say the meeting, whose formal activities at the convention center concluded yesterday, was very important to Hawaii because the 3,000 attendees included major decision-makers who influence the choice of places to hold company meetings.

The HVCB has booked 28 off-shore conventions for the convention center for 2002.

The conventions are expected to attract 94,300 people who will use 215,295 hotel room-nights and spend $280.8 million, of which $23.3 million will go into state and local tax coffers.