Any meeting planner in charge of running a four-day event for 28,000 requiring 15,000 room nights and which operates 24 hours a day is certainly not playing around, even if the show is one big game.
Rennie Araucto, director of event programming for Seattle-based Gen Con (www.gencon.com), discovered that the odds of holding an event of that magnitude are more than a roll of the dice in Indianapolis, however.
Gen Con Indy, the nation’s largest hobby gaming show—collectible card games, role-playing games, traditional board games such as Monopoly, and the like—found that the city’s location within a day’s drive of its primary attendee base, the close proximity of hotel rooms to the Indiana Convention Center, and a business atmosphere and CVB conducive to getting things done was reason enough to re-contract the destination through 2010.
“The hotel location is amazing,” Araucto says. “There are three hotels that are directly connected by a walkway to the convention center, and there’s a total of six major hotels that are literally one block away. You go two blocks away and you have five more hotels.”
Araucto says there are approximately 5,500 unique events that happen throughout the show, such as assigning game tables, more than 100 seminars and a few social events that can draw up to 4,000 attendees.
“About 2,000 of those events require me to assign individual tables to them,” he says. “Each event may be only two to four hours in length, and I need to place them in various hotel spaces—that’s a logistical nightmare, to say the least. People are playing all day and all night.”
Because of the massive room block, Gen Con gets all of its meeting space gratis, and even though its attendees typically don’t consume a lot of alcohol—think vast quantities of coffee and energy drinks—the Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association (ICVA) steps to the plate to emphasize the value of the group business coming in.
“The Indianapolis Convention & Visitors Association is our initial contact to help coordinate hotels, and the Indiana Convention Center is part of the [ICVA], so we leverage that relationship,” he says.
The ICVA also helps with a full range of marketing and logistical assistance.
“They’re very, very, very good,” Araucto says. “They’ve helped us find great security organizations and temp worker options, and there are great marketing opportunities through the ICVA, such as garbage can banners, skywalk banners, window clings, and escalator wraps. They’re really on top of it on how to market.”
“Because of how our attendees eat, they quadruple the amount of food they bring in and they stay open longer,” he says. “Our attendees eat late, so they adapt accordingly—they really get it.”
