By Daniel Miller
The L.A. Live Convention Center hotel has already booked a full slate of conventions two years before it opens,fulfilling its role of bringing action to the city’s starving convention business.
The project, part of Anschutz Entertainment Group’s $2.5 billion L.A. Live development, has booked 25 conventions,one for as far out as 2024. In total, the hotel project has advance bookings on more than 600,000 rooms, AEG said.
“Now downtown L.A. is able to provide what everyone wanted but didn’t have: a quality hotel right next to the Convention Center and surrounded by fun, upscale diversions,” said Michael Collins of the Los Angeles Convention and Tourism Bureau.
The 54-story hotel development, slated for completion in 2010, will house a JW Marriott hotel, a Ritz-Carlton hotel and 224 condominiums by Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. The project will have 1,001 total rooms and 77,000 square feet of meeting space.
And there will be plenty for visitors to do when they aren’t wandering the halls of the convention center,L.A. Live’s bars, restaurants and shops are already fully leased, said AEG Chief Executive Tim Leiweke.
The hotel recently scored two convention coups,the annual meetings held by the American Society of Association Executives and the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.
Currently, the hotel’s first event hosting is the American Society of Association Executives’ 2010 convention, scheduled for August of that year. That booking has resulted in 2,800 room reservations.
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Daniel Miller, staff writer for the Los Angeles Business Journal
