🔒As events industry preps for rebound, Hartford venues to face increased competition

After dealing with the pandemic for two years, Connecticut’s events industry is preparing for a rebound.

And Hartford area venues are going to see stiffer competition in the year ahead. At least two new major venues are scheduled to debut over the next 12 to 15 months that will compete for small, midsize and large-scale events.

Foxwoods announced in February it’s transforming its old bingo hall into the Rainmaker Expo Center, a 75,000-square-foot event space that will be able to host everything from trade shows to sporting events. The new facility will be Foxwoods’ largest event space and offer higher ceilings to compete for new types of programs. The goal is to draw more business to the southeast part of the state.

Meantime, work is ongoing on the $25 million Bristol Event Center that aims to be a destination for conferences and weddings.

Both venues will intensify competition for the city of Hartford, which has long relied on the Connecticut Convention Center, XL Center and other smaller properties to draw people into the city.

Foxwoods CEO Jason Guyot said his casino is increasing its conference space because it believes people will look more regionally for events and conventions following the pandemic.

Guyot said Foxwoods has been trying to navigate through COVID-19 as safely as possible, though new variants have disrupted plans over the past few months. Before the delta and omicron variants, Guyot said his staff “couldn’t even pick up the phone,” they were getting so many calls for event bookings.

He said Foxwoods is bullish on the live event industry as a whole and it hopes the Rainmaker Expo Center is open by fall.

The casino already has 175,000 square feet of meeting space, so the Rainmaker venue will increase that while offering something new. Much of the casino’s current conference offerings are meeting rooms and large ballroom-style spaces.

The new venue will have higher, stadium-like ceilings that offer more flexible space, in addition to an attached outdoor patio, Guyot said.

“We can hold everything from sporting events (including basketball, lacrosse and soccer), trade shows, large dinner events, you name it,” Guyot said. “It’s really up to whoever comes in and how they want to set up the space. I think it’s a good complement to what we already have.”

As part of its expansion, Foxwoods is also adding an indoor water park and a new, expanded bingo hall. It’s that diverse array of offerings all on one property that gives Foxwoods a competitive edge in attracting events, including from Hartford venues, Guyot said.

“We have everything under one roof – you can go out to dinner, go see a show, go out to the spa, go to an indoor water park,” Guyot said. “It makes it more of an easy decision for clients because the people they’ll bring will have so many options.”

Connecticut Convention Center General Manager Mike Costelli didn’t mince words when asked about how the pandemic has affected his facility.

“We had a lot of business on our books that was canceled – some of it moved forward and we’ll see it over the next few months, but the majority of it was either canceled or postponed from anywhere from a year to two years,” Costelli said.

Costelli said the corporate events and convention market dried up during the pandemic. Multi-day corporate meetings, banquets and awards dinners still aren’t being hosted in-person right now, which accounts for some of the convention center’s business. Many large employers like Traveler Cos. have allowed their employees to work remotely, lessening the need for in-person events, which he called the convention center’s “bread and butter.”

“That’s where we’ve seen a tremendous decline,” Costelli said.

However, public, consumer-driven shows are making a comeback.

The Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Connecticut hosted its home show earlier this month and the New England Concrete Manufacturers Association has a convention center event scheduled for March 16 and 17.

While trade shows are back, Costelli said attendance has been slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels, possibly a result of people still being tentative about attending in-person events. In a typical year, the Connecticut Convention Center hosts about 130 events with more than 320,000 visitors.

Costelli said the casinos and Providence Convention Center are his facility’s biggest competitors. The Bristol Event Center will have space for large business conferences, weddings and galas, but Costelli said he doesn’t expect it to directly compete with the convention center.

“They’re really not going to be going after the type of business that we are,” Costelli said.

He said casinos have been increasingly branching out into hosting public shows and corporate meetings rather than just concerts and sporting events.

Just a few years ago, Mohegan Sun opened an $80 million, 240,000-square-foot expo and convention center and was able to poach the Connecticut International Auto Show away from the convention center in Hartford. It later also poached the Hartford Boat Show.

“I see [casinos] being more competitive in the future than they have been to this point,” Costelli said. “They get to offer things like free parking, an abundance of entertainment for people in their off-time, which presents a challenge.”

What the convention center offers is good service and clean, organized facilities, Costelli said. Food and beverage services are also done in-house, and the downtown Hartford location and highway adjacency are something the facility promotes. With 20 loading bays around the building, just about anything can fit into the facility, he said.

Costelli said the addition of more hotel rooms downtown would help the convention center’s competitive position. A 2019 study commissioned by the Capital Region Development Authority recommended downtown Hartford add a new 400-room hotel to boost the market. But that was before the pandemic decimated Hartford’s lodging industry, forcing several hotels to close or shrink their number of available rooms.

“That’s a big deal because unfortunately the hotel market is shrinking rather than growing,” Costelli said.

Meantime, the XL Center in Hartford has been working to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Ben Weiss, general manager of the XL Center, said the live events industry was one of the first to shut down in March 2020, and one of the last to get back up and running since then.

“We’re in the business of putting people together,” Weiss said. “Our industry really has been crushed.”

Weiss said business started to normalize in the fall before the omicron variant caused a hiccup, but things are now looking up. He said attendance for the Hartford Wolf Pack hockey team is back to pre-pandemic levels, and UConn basketball had a sold out game versus Villanova on Feb. 22.

“The last couple Saturday nights we’ve had 5,000 tickets sold and the lower bowl is packed,” Weiss said of Wolf Pack games. “There’s great energy, and people are excited to be out.”

The XL Center primarily hosts concerts, shows and sporting events, and Weiss said that industry looks to be back in full gear this spring and summer. Most performers and live event tours are no longer delaying their events schedule, he said.

“There’s going to be a tremendous amount of touring business back out on the road full time,” Weiss said.

Weiss said he and his team are still mapping out their 2022 calendar and there’s a lot of interest in bringing shows to the region. In addition, the XL Center usually books about 15 convention and exhibit-style events a year, which Weiss said are beginning to come back as well.