Any thought out into how often you would actually be able to host a convention, assuming you can get people to come.

Football weekends consume all available hotels from Friday to Sun. A convention would need to end on Thursday so people could clear out and make room for football.

Graduation would consume all available hotel space knocking out 3 weeks.

Spring ring day is Thursday and Friday so you have knocked out that week for anything longer than a day or two. Fall ring days basically limit to a Thursday end. They also tend to fall on weekends that aren't home football games.

Also to avoid being Kentucky, you better exclude any regional or super regional weekends, just in case. Isn't first round of new 12 team football playoff supposed to be on campus… another Friday to Sunday gone.

If the hotel can hold all the conference attendees, it probably won't be impacted by fire school or beef 101 or things like that.

Still, a big chunk of the year, the conference center would be limited to avoid competing for hotel space with big TAMU events. Of course, the hotel could probably sell out for those events even as the conference center sits unused.

woodiewood1 said:

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Hornbeck said:

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Most Sales meetings I have been to are in places like this. But again, in the case of a large global company looking to bring a few thousand folks in for a big meeting or conference, ease of getting there (i.e. international airport) is the major consideration. College Station is not that. You can fly into Houston or Austin and drive more than an hour. I could see a small fire fighting convention (fire school related) or as someone said the beef cattle short course.

XYZ Corp is not having their world wide sales kickoff here. A&M even does their tech conference for the system in Galveston… why? My guess is that CS is hard to get to.

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Having managed about 50 conventions in a past life, one of the major considerations of convincing interested persons to attend, is not only the quality of the presentations, but of the activities and attractions outside of the formal convention activities...what we called in planning, the "day before day after, and evening activities".

If a attendee, and even more so if bringing family, Galveston has a tremendous amount of "outside" the formal program activities that would interest attendees. BCS has the Bush Library....what else?

Galveston has the beach, fresh seafood restaurants, Pleasure Pier, The Strand, deep sea fishing, city trolley, Railroad museum, Schlitterbahn Waterpark, and NASA a short drive away. That's just off the top of my head.

No comparison.

If we had one now, we would compete, as mentioned above, with Temple, Waco, etc on gun shows, art shows and other activities mostly attended by persons living in the area.

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Not to rain on your theory that Galveston is better...But you do realize we have a Hooters and Lake Bryan?

Quit bringing logic and facts into this discussion and just use tax monies to build a convention center and hotel already.

woodiewood1 said:

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Hornbeck said:

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Most Sales meetings I have been to are in places like this. But again, in the case of a large global company looking to bring a few thousand folks in for a big meeting or conference, ease of getting there (i.e. international airport) is the major consideration. College Station is not that. You can fly into Houston or Austin and drive more than an hour. I could see a small fire fighting convention (fire school related) or as someone said the beef cattle short course.

XYZ Corp is not having their world wide sales kickoff here. A&M even does their tech conference for the system in Galveston… why? My guess is that CS is hard to get to.

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Having managed about 50 conventions in a past life, one of the major considerations of convincing interested persons to attend, is not only the quality of the presentations, but of the activities and attractions outside of the formal convention activities...what we called in planning, the "day before day after, and evening activities".

If a attendee, and even more so if bringing family, Galveston has a tremendous amount of "outside" the formal program activities that would interest attendees. BCS has the Bush Library....what else?

Galveston has the beach, fresh seafood restaurants, Pleasure Pier, The Strand, deep sea fishing, city trolley, Railroad museum, Schlitterbahn Waterpark, and NASA a short drive away. That's just off the top of my head.

No comparison.

If we had one now, we would compete, as mentioned above, with Temple, Waco, etc on gun shows, art shows and other activities mostly attended by persons living in the area.

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Agree completely. Until we get a reputable strip club or 4 we will never be able to host solid conventions.