All this week at the Stamford Marriott, the Multistate Tax Commission holds daylong conferences on the tax codes in various states, featuring experts from throughout the region.
For once, you won”™t hear any carping on the taxes levied on hotel rooms and services.
Any dollar spent on a conference these days is a good dollar spent, in the eyes of a meetings and convention industry warily eyeing an economic downturn that has consumers and businesses stripping spending to all but the bare essentials.
According to the most recent estimates by the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, visitors pump $25 million daily on average into the state economy, much of that amount from Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut, but also bolstered by business conferences in Fairfield County and throughout the state.
In the past few years, the state has greatly expanded its capabilities, adding the ConnecticutConvention Center in Hartford and the new MGM Grand at Foxwoods; while several hotels have undergone multimillion-dollar upgrades.
Locally in September, however, tax revenue was down by half from Connecticut”™s tourism tax compared to a year ago, according to the state Department of Revenue Services, and a state Department of Labor “rapid response team” swooped in last week on Foxwoods and the adjacent MGM Grand to offer job placement services for 700 employees who were let go.
Globally, hotel occupancy rates in September were down between 5 percent and 7 percent compared with a year earlier, according to preliminary estimates by Smiths Travel Research. Things are bad enough that even the trade group Meetings Professional International canceled its annual meeting scheduled for Singapore this past weekend, indicating it would reschedule the event next year on a yet-to-be determined date.
In response, hotels and convention centers are expected to step up discounting in a bid to hang onto events that are already scheduled for their halls. There is already anecdotal evidence locally of a potential silver lining for mid-range hotels, which stand to gain by capturing business from pricier alternatives in Connecticut and New York.
In planning a Northeast regional meeting this month of the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs, the University of Bridgeport”™s Ward Thrasher elected not to go ahead with his original plans to hold the event at the eastern Connecticut casinos, instead choosing the comparatively modest Hilton Garden Inn in Shelton.
Thrasher, an assistant dean at the university, anticipated that schools would curtail their travel budgets.
Even after opting for the lower-cost venue, half the 50-plus people who originally planned to attend will show up in Shelton meeting, Thrasher estimated.
Against the drab backdrop, there was cause for hope. This month the first new hotel opened in New Haven in a decade, with The Study at Yale increasing the city”™s stock of hotel rooms by about 10 percent.
And at the height of the financial meltdown in late September, the Connecticut Convention Center served the most meals of any single week in the facility”™s three-year history ”“ 17,400 in all to visitors in town for conventions, banquets or meetings held by Price Chopper, the Business Women”™s Forum, and Microsoft Corp., among others. In all, the convention center sold 424,000 square feet of space in the last full week in September.
