year’s show at this year’s show. But in October, after a nine-month negotia- tion process that included securing discounted rates from 64 room-block hotels, Comic-Con announced that it would stay in San Diego through 2015. To find out how SDCCC van- quished its foes and kept the biggest comic- book convention in the world, Convene talked to Steve Johnson, SDCCC’s vice president of public affairs.
How important is Comic-Con to the San Diego Convention Center? It’s huge, for multiple reasons. Number one, Comic-Con is tied to San Diego. It was born in San Diego and has grown up in San Diego. We had an outside firm do research by doing direct interviews with close to 900 attendees. [Comic-Con’s] room block was typically 7,500 rooms, peak. What we found out was that about 134,000 people were in San Diego for the show, and about half — 68,000 — were staying in a hotel. So the reality is that this event was using more than 126,000 room nights. And just for the people who are stay- ing in hotels, it’s something like $67 million in direct spending each year. It’s a huge event.
Was the biggest limitation for San Diego the available space at the convention center? That’s one. The second is hotel room block. And [Comic-Con] needed prices that were fair. This event is so big that it makes San Diego the highest-occupancy hotel market in the nation the week we host Comic-Con. To put it in perspective, we have about 53,000 to 54,000 hotel rooms in the entire county of San Diego. On peak, Comic-Con is using 26,000 to 27,000 hotel rooms at any given time. It drives rates enormously.
How did you respond to the possibility of the show going somewhere else? We created an advisory committee of stake- holders that represented the hotel community and the convention center and the city of San Diego. We bolstered our bid with a $500,000 transportation allowance that was allocated to Comic-Con. The bid also included free exhibit space in hotels adjacent to the convention center, which added about 300,000 square feet of exhibit space and program space we don’t have in the building right now.
28 pcma convene December 2010
HEROES WELCOME: In October, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders an- nounced that the city would be keeping Comic-Con through 2015.
“For a lot of the citizens in
San Diego, they don’t really get
the value of some of the groups that are a little more inside- association. But they get Comic- Con. They’re proud of it.”
Was your expansion project undertaken specifically for Comic-Con? That was part of it. One of the things that was beneficial in terms of telling the story of the need to expand is that for a lot of the citizens in San Diego, they don’t really get the value of orthopedic surgeons or some of the groups that are a little more inside-association. But they get Comic-Con. They’re proud of it. We have a whole list of events that want to stay here but are outgrowing us. We have events that have already outgrown us but want to come back with an expansion. And then we have events that want to be in the building but because we’re booked there’s no space. An expansion will let us do all three: Host multiple concurrent events, recapture some of the events that have outgrown us, and keep the events that are growing that may very well move if we don’t have additional space.
Are you confident you’ll be able to keep Comic-Con after 2015? Absolutely. The expansion will be a huge asset to addressing their space needs and actually enhancing the experience for their attendees. I think once a shovel is in the ground on our expansion, we’ll be in good shape. n — Christopher Durso