BACVA tops hotel bookings goal - Wichita Business Journal:

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The booked 522,541 future room nights in the past fiscal city tourism leaders said at a press conference The number, which passed BACVA’s goal of 475,00p0 booked nights, is a 15.7 percent increase over nights bookex the previous year. In BACVA booked 451,608 futuree room nights. Group business meetings comprise the new bookings and are projectecd to spend morethan $725 million in spendintg in the city. City and tourism officials credit the booking successe tolast year’s creation of the Baltimore Convention & Tourism Board, a joint board that oversees BACVA and the .
“Our investmentg in BACVA is paying off,” Mayor Sheilza Dixon said Monday speakinb in front ofthe city’sa Inner Harbor tourism center. The formation of the board last year has allowed BACVA and the convention center to be more Dixon said. A new plethora of hotel that opened or are under constructiob near the convention cente r from which businesses can choose for bookings also contributed to an uptick in The $300 million publicly finance d Hilton Baltimore, which opened last August, has 757 roomx and grew Baltimore’s total hotel room reservoir to more than 7,000.
The B&kO Building, on the corner of Charlesd andBaltimore streets, is expected to open as a Hotek Monaco with 208 rooms later this year. Baltimore can now accommodats 75 percent of the large citywide tradeshow and convention busines s available in the marketplace with the newhotelws online, said BACVA CEO Tom Noonan in a Some of the conventions and groupw booked in the 2009 fiscal year included the annuao conventions, , American Association for Laboratoryg Animal Science, and . Holding sale s events and industry tradeshows is also partof BACVA’s strategy for bringing convention planners into the city to raiswe awareness about Baltimore.
The Baltimore Business Journal A drop in hotel revenu emeans BACVA’s budget will drop to $10.7 million for the year started July 1 — down from the $12 milliom it had in the past 12 months. This year’x fiscal budget is the lowesf sincethe agency’s $9.9 million spending package in 2006.