“We
have a number of factors coming together to make this our best year
ever,” said Richard Scharf, president & CEO of VISIT DENVER. “First,
we have an extremely strong convention calendar of meetings. We always
knew 2014 would be a good convention year with large groups like SIA
SnowSports, American Academy of Dermatology and Risk Insurance
Management Society. Not only did we have a large number of meetings
booked for Denver in 2014, but the conventions we had are all in
industries that are seeing increases in convention attendance,” Scharf
said.
“We
book conventions anywhere from five to 12 years out, so our sales team
targets segments of the meetings industry that we feel are likely to see
huge growth in attendance in the future, such as medical, bioscience,
energy, and technology/engineering related,” Scharf said.
He
added that, consistent with other top tier cities, the business travel
market has come back to Denver in 2014, which creates strong demand,
primarily from Tuesday
to Thursday. Denver is also experiencing a strong tourism year with
blockbuster shows like the record-setting Chihuly exhibition at Denver
Botanic Gardens.
“Denver
does best when all three mixes are performing well – the convention
market, leisure travelers and the business traveler,” Scharf said. He
added that two unscheduled Broncos playoff games in early 2014 leading
to the Super Bowl, and having the National Education Association group
in town with 12,000 delegates over the traditionally slow Fourth of July
Weekend, have also added to the year-over-year growth.
Scharf
notes that other indicators of just how strong this year is for tourism
are the growth in occupancy and average room rate. For the first three
quarters of the year, Denver’s hotel room occupancy climbed to 78.2
percent versus 73.0 percent for the same time period last year, while
average daily rate reached $124.44 for 2014, up from $115.40 in 2013.
This
performance has made Denver one of the national leaders for RevPAR
growth, according to Smith Travel Research, a group that studies hotel
occupancies in the top 25 cities of the country. RevPAR (Revenue per
Available Room) is a performance metric in the hotel industry that uses
total guestroom revenue and the room count.
Denver’s
increases in occupancy and revenue came in spite of new hotel inventory
coming into the market such as the 221-room Renaissance Denver Downtown
City Center and the 119-room Crawford Hotel this year, and the 302-room
Hampton Inn and Homewood Suites that opened last year.
“Usually,
when you add rooms to a city, you will see an overall drop in occupancy
and average room rate unless you also increase demand,” Scharf said.
“However, this year, the demand is so significant, that we have been
able to absorb more than 600 new hotel rooms and still see an increase
in occupancy and rate,” he said.
Denver Lodger’s Tax collection for the first three-quarters of 2014 was also up, climbing 14 percent.