New Horizons

Barnet Hill, a Sundial Group facility, is just outside Guiltford in Surrey, England.

One significant advantage to working in a well-established niche market is the ability to deliver a recognizable product to customers an advantage the member facilities of the St. Louis-based International Association of Conference Centers offer their meeting planner clients.
    These centers provide high-quality meeting space that adheres to a strict code called the Universal Criteria a set of requirements concerning ergonomic chairs, soundproofing, F&B and more all in the interest of providing an optimum learning environment. Most member facilities are full-service properties (complete with sleeping rooms) that also have passed a rigorous inspection to gain membership in the organization. They offer meeting planners one-stop shopping in the form of the complete meeting package, which includes everything from room rate and basic A/V (yes, an LCD projector is part of the package) to continuous F&B breaks for attendees who wander in and out of meeting rooms.
    The downside to being a niche market is a certain restraint of growth that comes when opportunities to expand in desirable destinations dwindle and developers have to look to new places. In the recent past, the number of IACC-approved conference centers in the United States has remained relatively static at just over 200, and the largest area of growth has been in a new category called ancillary centers, where the meeting space is up to IACC standards but the attached hotel is not.
    “The barrier to entry in some of the markets in the States is saturation,” says Jeffrey V. Farina, chief development officer for The Woodlands, Texas-based management company Benchmark Hospitality and current president of the North American board of IACC. He also notes that it’s just too expensive to build in the most desirable U.S. markets. 
    “Because of the somewhat limited opportunities in the United States,” Farina says, “right now many of the opportunities are global.”

Branching out
IACC long has had a worldwide membership its founding fathers envisioned this eventuality when naming the organization. Currently, the association counts 95 international center members (see “Planning Abroad,” below), most of which are run by local owners and management companies. But conference center management companies based in the United States have been slow to venture abroad. 

French host: The IACC-approved Dolce Chantilly near Paris

    That trend is changing, and to support it, IACC added two executives to its global board of directors last year to encourage international development. One was Philippe Attia, vice president of operations, Europe, for Montville, N.J.-based Dolce International, which owns and manages two IACC-approved properties in France (Dolce Chantilly, near Paris, and Dolce Frégate in Provence). In joining the global board, Attia helped bring other Dolce International properties into the IACC fold: Germany’s Dolce Bad Nauheim, the Netherlands’ Dolce Kasteel Vaalsbroek and Spain’s Dolce Sitges. With all this movement in Europe and several centers in development, there is talk of adding a Western Europe chapter to IACC; at the moment, aside from the North American chapter, Australia, Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom are the only countries with chapters.
    Also new to the association’s board is Kozue Honda, general manager for Benchmark’s two Japanese properties, the private Tokyo Conference Center Iidabashi and the public Tokyo Conference Center Shinagawa. She has since begun to reach out to other centers in Japan, according to Tom Bolman, CAE, IACC’s executive vice president.
    “We want to give planners as many options as we can of bona fide centers around the world,” says Bolman of the organization’s global initiative. “We’ve found a number of conference centers in South Africa; that appears to be an area ripe for expansion.” 
    Other recent entries include several centers near Sydney, Australia, all existing properties that either were IACC-ready but hadn’t applied for membership or centers that were encouraged to raise their standards. “The Australia chapter has gone from 15 to 29 centers in the past 18 months,” says Bolman. The association also recently received an application from a brand new ancillary center in South Korea.
    Interestingly, not one facility is in Central or South America. “Years ago, there was a conference center in Mexico, but they diluted the concept,” Bolman notes. “Adding the international people to the board was to reach out to areas where we don’t have much membership. If we found somebody in South America, we’d add them immediately.”

Celebrating Iacc’s Silver Anniversary

IACC’s Tom Bolman

In April 1981, Charles Williams, managing director of the Sterling Forest Conference Center in Upstate New York (which no longer exists) fulfilled a dream by founding the International Association of Conference Centers with 22 member facilities.
     The organization’s first successful project was a site-referral service that now looks quaint compared with how planners search for properties these days. Back then, requests for proposal with dates, number of rooms and geographical preference were sent to IACC, and the organization sent back brochures from members in the specified region. Planners then were given the option of allowing IACC to do some of the legwork for them or making contact themselves. 
     Twenty-five years later, Williams has moved on to work in commercial real estate, but the group he founded is going strong. IACC has more than 300 member facilities worldwide, including 225 centers in North America. The requirements for membership have changed quite a bit as well. In a 1983 interview with M&C, Williams listed five criteria. Among them: Business at member properties had to be 60 percent meetings; conference rooms had to be the nucleus of the properties; and the centers had to offer a package rate. Now, centers must adhere to 30 strict requirements called the Universal Criteria (viewable here: www.iaccglobal.org/about/index.cfm?fuseaction=memcrit).
     “The conference center concept has evolved over 25 years, particularly with ancillary conference centers,” says Tom Bolman, IACC’s executive vice president. “But some things haven’t changed. Our challenge from day one has been to differentiate ourselves from hotels. The line has gotten grayer, with hotels packaging services. Fortunately, they just don’t get [the concept] totally.”
     Burt Cabañas, chairman and CEO of The Woodlands, Texas-based Benchmark Hospitality, was IACC’s first vice president and second president (after Williams). “I think the organization has evolved to be a pretty dominant force in getting the message out about conference centers what they are and how they differ from the rest of the hospitality industry,” he says. 
     Conference center management firm Dolce International also debuted 26 years ago, and Andy Dolce, chairman and CEO, joined IACC in its first year. “IACC’s main contribution? Creating awareness with our customers and offering education to our members,” he says. “Those have been very effective.” -- S.B.

On demand
If U.S.-based companies are beginning to look to other shores for opportunities, it’s because their customers have indicated they’d be interested in holding meetings at conference centers outside North America.
    “We were driven to go to Europe because of the way our customers were buying, starting with Frégate in 1992,” says Andy Dolce, chairman and CEO of Dolce International. “We’ve expanded in major Western European cities and continue to look at such places, including Madrid, Munich, Paris and Rome.”
    Mike Fahner of Philadelphia’s Aramark Harrison Lodging, which operates 36 centers in the States and one in Canada, says his company increasingly is working with business education firms, such as Duke Corporate Education, an arm of North Carolina’s Duke University. “They have decided that instead of getting potential students to come to their campus, they will take the message to you on the road,” says Fahner, AHL’s vice president of development. “We are doing a fair amount of business with them on the East Coast, and they have said they would like us to have a presence outside London, somewhere in the European common market and on the Pacific Rim, so we are looking into it.”
    A sales organization for the industry, Annapolis, Md.-based EMC Venues, is helping bring meetings to the international properties. The company already works with Aramark, Benchmark and Dolce and recently has begun selling properties of the U.K.’s Sundial Group. 
    “Some of our clients have asked us to help them in places like Germany and France,” says Chuck Ocheltree, chief development officer. “That’s our focus for 2006 to build international relationships. One of our customers takes a lot of her meetings to Latin America, so we are going to start compiling a list of conference centers there. We can work with the hotels to introduce the idea of package pricing and what should be included in the package, and get them to meet the needs of those customers.”

Benchmark Hospitality’s BurtCabañas

Where to next?
U.S.-based management companies are casting their development eyes all over. Benchmark’s chairman and CEO, Burt Cabañas, is looking at Chile, Denmark and Spain, not to mention Beijing, and he wouldn’t mind expanding in Japan. A property in Denmark might be the next overseas spot to carry the Benchmark name, as Cabañas has teamed up with Jorgen Roed, chairman and founder of the Scanticon conference centers that were some of the first international IACC properties.
    “We will not enter an international market unless there is a property of a significant size,” says Cabañas. “Anything small would not be sufficient to allow us to enter into a country.” 
    He mentions, however, how difficult it is to start conducting business in a new country. “The study of culture is more time-consuming than you might think, and appropriately so.” 
    Cabañas welcomes IACC’s global initiatives as he takes Benchmark farther afield: “As long as globalization doesn’t turn into homogenization, we will do all right.”
    Andy Dolce is looking for a “beachhead” to acquire in the United Kingdom. “We think the U.K. is pretty critical, since many international corporations have headquarters there,” he says.
    He’s also had inquiries from developers and banks in Eastern Europe (“nothing that we’re chasing right now”), but Dolce believes a center in that part of the continent might come to fruition in a few years, possibly in Budapest, Prague or Warsaw. The company also is working on a potential joint venture in Japan that would bring Dolce centers there as well as to China and South Korea. Dolce’s next European property will be the Dolce La Hulpe Brussels (Belgium), a conference center undergoing a renovation and scheduled to open in February 2007.
    Spain probably will be the first European destination to offer a conference center managed by Aramark Harrison Lodging. “We are working with Aramark Spain on a project that would be outside Barcelona,” says Fahner. “Construction is under way, but there is no hard opening date yet.”