Growth to Help Indianapolis Secure More Meetings and Events

Leonard Hoops, president and CEO of Visit Indy, has even more reasons to talk about bringing meetings and events to Indianapolis, like 1,400 more rooms and an expansion of the Indiana Convention Center.

City officials have announced that two new hotel towers will be built, both under the Hilton brand. One of the towers would be a 38-story, 800-room hotel that would be the city’s second-largest hotel behind the JW Marriott, which has 1,005 rooms. The second tower would be a 600-room property. Both hotels would be privately funded (no cost estimates were released).

The two hotels would bring to 6,100 the number of rooms connected by enclosed skywalks in Indianapolis.

The city also announced plans for a publicly funded expansion of the convention center, adding what would be the state’s largest ballroom, a 50,000-square-foot facility, at Pan Am Plaza. The ballroom would connect to the convention center and the two new hotels.

Officials said the project would be funded with $120 million in bonds. This will be the sixth expansion of the convention center since it opened in 1972. It currently has 566,000 square feet and is the 15th-largest conference center in the country.

“For more than four decades, Indy has been designing and building a downtown convention and events district to be the best in the world,” Hoops said. “This expansion, the sixth since the Indiana convention center opened in 1972, combined with two new integrated hotel towers, will add one of the largest convention center ballrooms in the country and take Indy to more than 6,100 hotel rooms connected to the center by enclosed skywalks. If you built a convention and events district from scratch, this is what it would look like.”

Indianapolis was the host city for this year’s World Education Congress, the signature education event for Meeting Professionals International. The event, held in June, was deemed a success on many fronts, including the feedback on Indianapolis as a meeting and event destination. Paul Van Deventer, president and CEO of MPI, said that 86 percent of conference attendees said they would recommend or bring a meeting to Indianapolis because of their experience during WEC.

MPI’s conference utilized the convention center, eight hotels connected to the convention center and Pan Am Plaza, opened in 1972 as part of the city hosting the Pan American Games, which was the location of the MPI Foundation’s Rendezvous event.

The new hotels and ballroom were necessary to help keep the city competitive for meetings and events. Officials from Visit Indy said the project would enable Indianapolis to retain nearly $290 million in annual conventions and put the city in position to compete for more than 200 groups that want more meeting space or hotel rooms. This expansion allows Visit Indy to collectively generate up to $1.1 billion in future economic impact for the region and state.

Likewise, there are some events that are getting larger and would be able to continue going to Indianapolis with the additional rooms and space. Gen Con, for example, the largest tabletop gaming convention, attracts more than 60,000 people when it comes to Indianapolis each year. Gen Con has considered leaving Indianapolis, but has now committed to going to the city through 2023 as a result of the new builds.

The new, 38-story hotel tower will feature a reflective glass exterior that includes multiple levels of retail and a rooftop bar offering the only high-rise view from the southwest side of downtown. The second hotel tower would anchor the opposite corner of the block, across from Union Station.

Officials said all the necessary agreements and legislative approvals should be reached in 2019, and construction for the project is expected to take about three years.

The Indiana Convention Center currently offers three ballrooms totaling about 61,000 square feet of function space, with the largest ballroom at 33,335 square feet.

According to Rockport Analytics, 28.6 million visitors provide $5.2 billion in total economic impact annually to the Indianapolis region, generate 80,600 full-time equivalent jobs in Central Indiana and provide $1.2 billion in local, state and federal tax revenues. The city has set tourism records each year since 2011, according to Rockport Analytics.