An expansion of the Anaheim Convention Center is scheduled to open this fall, and shows of all sizes are looking at ways of using the enlarged facility, which when the dust clears will offer 25% more exhibit space.
A new 200,000-square-foot chunk of flexible exhibit area joins 813,000 existing square feet, the two sections connected by an enclosed bridge. Also new are 1,350 parking spaces, bringing the total to 3,246 (see map, page 38).
The expansion, just a few months behind the original schedule, has caught the eye of shows with mid-range attendance counts that often need extensive exhibit space—but more crucially, hospitality industry executives pushed for the project to prevent the city’s biggest shows from leaving town.
The National Association of Music Merchants, or NAMM, opens this week, followed by Natural Products Expo West in March.
Natural Products has been held in Anaheim since it started in 1981, and NAMM has been staged there since 1978. Both sell several hundred thousand hotel nights during their stays.
NAMM attracts 101,000 attendees and 1,600 exhibitors to Anaheim for a four-day run. The center’s largest show fills all exhibit space, every meeting room, the Grand Plaza in front of the center that’s flanked by Hilton Anaheim and Anaheim Marriott, plus space in both hotels.
Music maker Yamaha Corp. in Buena Park takes about 27,000 square feet for its booth at the Marriott.
NAMM is bursting at Anaheim’s seams.
“It’s our only show where we’ve had to limit growth,” said Jay Burress, president and chief executive of Visit Anaheim, which markets the city as a destination.
Only Natural
The Natural Products show is the center’s second largest. It’s gone from 200 exhibitors and 3,000 attendees in its first year to 3,100 exhibitors this year—more than the first year’s attendee count. The show drew 77,000 attendees last year, up by 6,000 year-over-year and by 13,000 over 2014, a growth curve that suggests a crowd of more than 80,000 this year.
“We always anticipate at least last year’s number,” said Adam Anderson, managing director of New Hope Network, which owns and runs the show.
The event is the largest of its seven shows—“We’re basically based in Anaheim”—and like NAMM has begun to fill hotel space with exhibitors; it’s in both the Hilton and Marriott this year.
It uses the Grand Plaza for yoga classes in the morning and music at night.
The show also fills basement exhibit space in the main convention center area. “It’s the hottest spot in the show,” Anderson said. “We put new companies and innovators all together, and everyone goes down there.”
Goads to Growth
NAMM and Natural Products have been goose and goad to convention center growth.
Speakers at the expansion’s April 2015 groundbreaking named NAMM a prime impetus to the project.
Anaheim is the largest West Coast convention center, Burress said, though Las Vegas is about twice its size, even with the expansion, and an option for shows that outgrow Anaheim.
The limits of the pre-expansion center were such that “they’d consider moving,” Burress said of NAMM, and Anderson said, “Vegas is definitely an option” for shows of Natural Product’s size.
Burress said a goal of the expansion was to “secure these large annual events.”
Natural Products is negotiating its deal for 2018 to 2022 and reserving dates into the 2030s, Anderson said.
“This is definitely not our last year.”
NAMM is booked through 2023, has set aside dates through 2025, and has a request for proposals out to it take it through 2030, said Burress and Visit Anaheim Senior Vice President of Sales and Services Junior Tauvaa.
Events Plans
“NAMM should be very happy” about the new space, said David DuBois, president and chief executive of Dallas-based International Association of Exhibitions and Events, which held its annual U.S. gathering in December in Anaheim, drawing 2,300 people. Association members bring events to cities.
DuBois said convention organizers, show exhibitors and events planners, the latter of whom create hospitality suites and other attendee confabs for corporate clients, want the options an expansion gives.
Show participants expect creative booth design, advanced technology, and variety in staging of educational elements—DuBois said new spaces can arrange for seminars inside an exhibit hall, for instance.
“People are looking for unique venues,” said Melissa Fromento, managing director of Penton Meetings, which put on The Special Event at Long Beach Convention Center last week—the show was in Anaheim in 2015.
Its 5,000 attendees included corporate events planners, caterers and other companies that create events within convention center shows.
Flex Space
Natural Products show organizers plan to move 550 of its 3,100 exhibitors that are now at the Hilton and Marriott into the new space and replace them at the hotels with partnership and affiliate events, such as client hospitality suites.
DuBois said the center’s new space could also allow it to stage different show elements there, attracting more groups that want options. A group’s large meetings, such as a keynote address, or its educational components, could go into new space, and, “You don’t need as many meeting rooms outside the hall.”
Burress said a second goal of the expansion is the ability to overlap events.
The center sometimes has been unable to book empty exhibit halls for two concurrent conventions because the first client needed all of the meeting rooms, leaving none for the other show. Center officials hope the expansion will resolve that issue, at least in most cases.
“We want simultaneous shows,” Burress said.
DuBois said, “Multiple events means a lot to smaller groups” because they prevent them from being shut out.
He said multiple bookings produce an aggregate effect that mimics the economic impact of a single large show.
“You fill more hotels, get more people at Disney.”
New Shows
Hilton Anaheim sales and marketing director Matt Kovac said layered events bring more room nights than not.
A technology show in 2019 and a national association convention in 2020 have both blocked at least 1,500 peak-time rooms at the Hilton for their events. Peak time is an event’s busiest point, typically in the middle of its run.
Kovac said the expansion also dovetails with “four-diamond hotel inventory” slated for Anaheim, and that together the additions should raise the city’s profile and bring in a higher level of guest. Developers have announced at least four such hotels, including a Disneyland Resort property.
“Expansion gives [Anaheim] flexibility to pursue new markets,” he said.
Burress’ third goal is those new markets, which he said include the medical and technology industries.
The push for such groups began before the center’s expansion was certain. Upcoming shows in those categories include several with five-day runs:
n November’s American Heart Association Scientific Sessions, with 18,000 attendees.
n December’s American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, with 20,000 attendees.
n American Association of Clinical Chemistry in 2021, with 21,000 attendees.
Medical, scientific and academic groups and associations often need exhibit space beyond what visitor counts suggest for educational sessions and exhibitors that go big on booths.
Good Chemistry
The Commodity Classic is an agriculture technology show scheduled to come to Anaheim in February 2018. It draws about 10,000 people but takes up all of the current exhibit space. Farmers come to check out exhibitors’ farm equipment and attend extensive educational sessions.
The chemistry group bringing its annual scientific meeting to Anaheim in 2021 attracted 21,000 attendees last year to Philadelphia, though the 750 exhibitors filled 679,000 square feet of exhibit space, and 50 exhibitors were on a waiting list.
“The size of the expo is the thing,” said group Chief Executive Janet Kreizman. “We’re out of space for this year in San Diego,” which has about 615,000 square feet in its exhibit hall and a second pavilion.
The group plans to take all of Anaheim Convention Center’s current 813,000 square feet in 2021 and hold events in area hotels. It will have the option by then of taking some of the expansion space.
“Some of our exhibitors go all out,” Kreizman said.
Many bring new products, such as instruments and test equipment for laboratory medicine.
“The in vitro diagnostics industry is big this year … molecular and genomic areas are huge.”
The 8,000 association members include medical personnel in more than a dozen areas, including immunology, hematology, endocrinology, toxicology, animal chemistry and nutrition. Show visitors also include medical technologists who use lab and test equipment, and the hospital administrators who buy it.
Kreizman said she estimates 10% to 15% annual attendees growth. “What’s important to us is not having to split the show up.”
