Thousands of meeting planners gather in San Diego; Clintons will join them

The event is a chance for the city to court some of the most lucrative conventions.

SAN DIEGO — Thousands of meeting planners from around the world are gathering in San Diego this week for their annual conference, providing local tourism leaders a rare opportunity to court some of the most lucrative conventions capable of delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in local business.

The 7,000-member Professional Convention Management Assn., last in the city a dozen years ago, launched its four-day meeting on Sunday and will be followed on Tuesday with appearances by former President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. senator and secretary of State. They will participate in a moderated discussion led by the convention leadership.

The Convening Leaders meeting, as it is known, is a high-stakes event.

“For us, it’s the most iconic kind of event you can get, and getting all of the people in the events industry in one place helps us with our goal of sustaining that huge economic impact we get from conventions, as well as the tax revenue that goes directly into the city’s general fund,” said Clifford “Rip” Rippetoe, chief executive of the San Diego Convention Center Corp. “All these planners from around the world who decide whether they come here for their conventions will be here over the next week.”

Julie Coker, who leads the San Diego Tourism Authority, refers to the conference as the “Super Bowl” of the events industry. Her sales team expects to wrangle multiple bookings during the course of the gathering, enough to generate half a million hotel-room nights, Coker says.

Besides the convention’s educational sessions, there will be San Diego tours, including stops at Petco Park and the San Diego airport, where a 30-gate terminal is being built. The convention will close with a Boyz II Men concert at the Rady Shell, a popular bayfront venue for locals.

The convention center corporation is anticipating a record-breaking $1.7-billion infusion into the local economy this fiscal year from its lineup of more than 50 major conventions and shows, up significantly from the $1.3 billion in the 2019 fiscal year before the arrival of the business-busting pandemic.

Direct spending on such things as hotels, restaurants and attractions is forecast to be $1.1 billion — also a record — and room nights booked for conventions is expected to total 961,000, compared with 823,000 in 2019, the last pre-COVID-19 year.

Among some of the bigger conventions headed to San Diego this year are the American Academy of Dermatology, American Assn. for Cancer Research, American Thoracic Society International Conference, and the BIO International Convention, which typically attracts more than 15,000 biotechnology and pharma leaders.

Overall attendance has been slow to come back as a result of the pandemic. Attendees initially weren’t eager to return to in-person events. Also a number of the big medical conventions, which tend to attract a lot of participants from overseas, have seen that sector of their attendance lag.

For the Professional Convention Management Assn. conference, however, organizers are expecting attendees from 46 countries, with roughly 20% of participants coming from outside North America, said Megan Risch of PCMA.

“San Diego is a very competitive market in meetings and events, and every destination is upgrading their centers. I just saw that Los Angeles is looking to expand their center,” said Junior Tauvaa, PCMA’s chief business officer. “Meeting organizers when they come here will be looking at whether the convention center can hold their events . ... So it’s important for San Diego to continue to be competitive.”