Tourism and Civic Center Promote Statesville to Meeting Planners

STATESVILLE, NC – For every meeting and convention that is held, someone is behind the scenes planning it.

That person is called a meeting planner. In December, around 500 of them will gather in Raleigh to find out about meeting venues across the state. Representatives from Statesville will be there.

Libba Barrineau, executive director of the Statesville Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Kenny Roberts, director of the Statesville Civic Center, will be showcasing meeting sites and services at the Association Executives of North Carolina (AENC) annual trade show.

“This is a new initiative for our tourism efforts in Statesville. Conventions can provide significant income to a city. For a town our size, I feel most convention goers spend around $160 per day during their stay. So this is a lucrative market to solicit,” explained Barrineau.

She added that planners are continuously looking for cost-cutting ways to hold meetings. They look for cities that provide an appropriate amount of meeting space and sleeping rooms. So a small conference isn’t going to look to city like Atlanta or Washington, DC. The meeting planner will seek a smaller town, like Statesville. “That’s the market segment we serve,” she commented.

She said one of the first questions meeting planners ask is about the amount of square footage. Conventions may have a meal in one room, a seminar in another and a trade show in the third. “Between the Holiday Inn Statesville, Statesville Civic Center, the new Courtyard by Marriott, which will open in Spring 2009, the Hampton Inn and Glutton’s Restaurant, we have a little more than 22,000 square feet. In May 2009, the new Holiday Inn Express will open. We will have 1,504 sleeping rooms, putting Statesville in a fantastic position to go after the convention market. Our meeting rooms provide various levels of high-tech electronic capabilities that meeting planners need.”

Barrineau says the additional sleeping rooms and meeting space will give Statesville a competitive edge against towns like Greenville and Hickory.

AENC executive director Jim Thompson said, “There is competition for the convention market. We have 43 CVB’s from across the state who utilize their membership to get in front of key professional meeting planners – the people who coordinate conventions for associations, corporations and governmental agencies.”
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