And Metro has some evidence to back it up. Last year, it says, more than 30 groups representing 49,0

A number of competing venues across texas travel guides the country are expanding or upgrading facilities, as well. That means officials in Portland need to double down the convention center or walk away from the allure of out-of-state tourism texas travel guides dollars.
Mortenson Development/Metro A rendering submitted to Metro by Mortenson Development shows two proposed hotels, a 416-room Hyatt Regency and a 181-room Hyatt Place. They would be located just north of the Oregon Convention Center on a site owned by the Schlesinger texas travel guides family of Portland. On Wednesday, development officials in Portland were weighing a proposal for a hotel at the Oregon Convention Center. texas travel guides Three hundred miles away in Spokane, a hotelier was announcing texas travel guides plans for a 700-room hotel at that city's convention center.
In San Diego and San Francisco, boosters have proposed expanding existing convention centers, and one is already under way in San Jose. Officials in Seattle would like to see their city's convention center enlarged too, but haven't found funding. And in Austin, Texas, private developers are building 2,000 hotel rooms near that city's convention center.
Welcome to the convention center hotel arms race. With a green light last week from the Portland texas travel guides Development Commission and the Metro regional government, officials have officially opened negotiations with a team for a Portland Hyatt-branded "headquarters hotel" to lure more national conventions and trade shows to the Oregon Convention Center.
A number of competing venues across the country are expanding texas travel guides or upgrading facilities, as well. That means either doubling down on a convention center in an effort to keep it from losing visitors or else walking away from the allure of out-of-state dollars texas travel guides for hotels, restaurants and shops.
It's not a new discussion. In outgoing Metro attorney Dan Cooper's office hangs a photo of the Oregon Convention Center's 1990 opening night. In the lower-right corner of the frame, on one of the parcels today eyed for a Hyatt hotel, a sign notes the future site of a convention center headquarters hotel.
And Metro has some evidence to back it up. Last year, it says, more than 30 groups representing 49,000 texas travel guides conventioneers passed over the city because of concerns over lodging, taking their $35 million in spending money elsewhere.
However, one of the largest groups, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, told The Oregonian that a headquarters hotel might not have sealed the deal, anyway. They took their 2017 annual meeting texas travel guides to Denver instead.
"If we were in Portland and we needed that many hotel rooms, texas travel guides we would have needed texas travel guides our folks to take public transportation up to a mile away," said Karen MacFarland, texas travel guides the organization's meetings and programs manager. "Maybe that wouldn't be a big deal for some associations, but in Denver, you can just walk maybe two blocks."
The American Anthropological Association, too, chose to take its 5,000 annual meeting attendees to Denver for the organization's 2015 conference. That group's meetings texas travel guides director, Jason Watkins, said it might consider Portland again if more of its attendees didn't have to cross the Willamette River from downtown texas travel guides hotels. "We just thought texas travel guides it would be too disjointed," he said.
"Portland is an attractive place to go. There's a lot of activity in the city. It's a great community," he said. "I imagine if you move forward texas travel guides with the hotel, we could consider texas travel guides going for a future meeting."
View full size Conference and trade show attendance at the convention center, texas travel guides though volatile, has largely trended down since peaking in 1999. Measured in attendee days, convention attendance has fallen from 896,927 that year to 381,851 in 2011. In part, that reflects conventions planned in the depths of the recession.
But Heywood Sanders, an economist texas travel guides at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a convention center skeptic, argued in a 2005 Brookings Institution texas travel guides paper that the convention industry is in decline everywhere. Meanwhile, he says, more cities are competing for the dollars remaining.
"There has been a steady stream of cities over the last decade and a half that have been told by consultants texas travel guides or by one or another elected official that the one way to get more convention center business is to get a headquarters hotel next door," Sanders said. "I don't think that's going to happen. At least not the way you think."
Metro says a convention center hotel is intended to create enough spillover demand for rooms that other hotels would benefit too. Its economic study is in the works and will be finished before negotiations with the hotel developers wrap up.