Meeting space is meeting space, right?
That’s a reasonable conclusion if you go by mere numbers on the Orange County Business Journal’s 2016 ranking of local hotels by square footage of ballrooms and board rooms.
The hotels that made up the top 50 last year are all on this year’s list—and our research shows meeting space available at the properties increased by 5,774 square feet—an expansion that amounts to a rounding error of less than half of 1% on the list’s total of 1.3 million square feet.
The increase wouldn’t make the list if it represented a hotel—the bump is less than the 6,263 square feet at our No. 50-ranked property, The Ranch at Laguna Beach.
In a healthy hotel market, though, the details are as vital as ever, and OC properties jockey for position with the best of them—if not significantly in numerical rankings, at least in upgrades and tweaks to event offerings.
The hotel market is also bringing changes to the tried and true rankings—new hotels on the way will shift the meetings space landscape this year.
Top 10
The 10 largest hotels by meeting space last year are still the top 10 this year, albeit with minor adjustments up or down, according to Business Journal data. Their collective meeting space is essentially unchanged.
The seven largest event offerings in order are unchanged year-over-year, starting with Hilton Anaheim and moving down: Disneyland Hotel, Anaheim Marriott, Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove, Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa, Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa, and Hotel Irvine.
They combine for about 560,000 square feet of indoor space, nearly half the list’s total, spread across 273 rooms, or about a third of the 858 meeting rooms at the list’s 50 largest sites.
Four of the seven are in the broader Anaheim/Garden Grove market and serve the Disneyland Resort and the Anaheim Convention Center (see related article on the latter facility’s largest show, NAMM, which takes place this week, page 1).
The top three hotels on the list—Hilton Anaheim, Disneyland Hotel, and Anaheim Marriott—draft off of or are directly related to the resort, the convention center, or both.
Corporate guests who “bring their families with them on business trips and spend an extra day going to Disneyland or an Anaheim Ducks game” are a presence at Hilton Anaheim, said Claudia Schou, the hotel’s public relations and marketing manager.
Theater
One upgrade that’s gotten good use is Hotel Irvine’s theater, which reopened a year ago, in time for 2015 event business. General Manager Jeroen Quint said the 2,310-square-foot amphitheater for audio-visual presentations got upgrades in seating and technology and “is one of the quickest to book up” of the venue’s spaces.
The hotel is owned by Newport Beach-based Irvine Co. and has 36,000 square feet of interior meeting space, good for the No. 7 spot on the list and including “one of the largest ballrooms in the county,” Quint said.
Hotel Irvine’s largest room is 14,700 square feet, according to our research. It would rank No. 5 if we listed hotels by largest single spaces.
The hotel is closing in on 50,000 square feet of available indoor-outdoor space, including a new 10,000-square-foot lawn (see related marketing article, page 17)
The lawn was used as something of a community meeting space last year when Hotel Irvine—which has bid for local patronage as part of its refashioning into a local “lifestyle” hotel—showed 1980s movies there on some Fridays this past summer.
Coming Soon
Two of several hotels scheduled to open next year (see related development article, page 14) will add 56,000 square feet to the local market and the list—about 10 times last year’s increase.
n Great Wolf Lodge Southern California in Garden Grove has begun booking business for a late February opening that includes 21,000 square feet of meeting space about 600 rooms.
Its Madison, Wisc.-based owner, Great Wolf Resorts, has 13 family-focused resorts in the U.S.—each with an indoor water park, for instance. Rhonda Khabir, corporate sales director for the parent, said conference centers are “a way to provide year-round revenue” that makes up for drop-offs in tourism.
“We have significant day meetings business, as well, and about 100 national accounts.”
The resorts are spread across the country, so some companies can host simultaneous events at two or more resorts with the help of remote conferencing for participants.
Banking and finance clients with national operations “move from site-to-site for their quarterly regional meetings so the weather’s always good,” Khabir said.
n Paséa Hotel & Spa in Huntington Beach is scheduled to bring another 35,000 square feet of meeting space online by June in 250 rooms.
General Manager Scott Blakeslee said he anticipates clients from “aerospace to action sports” who want a luxury experience in a beachfront locale.
“It’s luxury, but it has to be earthy, authentic, artistic.”
