For a hospitality and tourism industry in the fight of its life, a gloomy Little Rock tale of the tape: More than 50 events at Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau venues have been canceled into August at an economic impact of $7.4 million, and downtown hotels’ March revenue compared to last year plunged a feverish 90%.
All this is from an April 4 update from Gretchen Hall, the bureau’s beleaguered but determined chief executive, who is collecting data on a COVID-19 business crisis that obviously isn’t disappearing anytime soon.
The bureau also announced that it would furlough 65 employees, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Some employees had their hours cut by half, the newspaper said.
“With the situation continuing to grow, there are still too many unknowns to predict,” Hall told Arkansas Business on Monday morning. “We are hopeful that things will slowly start to pick up this summer, but feel it will be a very slow process. We may not see convention business back until next year.”
The 51 canceled events at the LRCVB’s Statehouse Convention Center and Robinson Center, dating from March 12’s Volley in the Rock to an Aug. 14 event for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, were expected to draw 45,000 attendees and generate 10,000 room-night bookings at downtown hotels. Here is a list.
Meanwhile, more than three dozen conventions, concerts and other gatherings at the two venues have been postponed from through the summer, including the Employment Law & Legislative Affairs Conference, the farthest-in-the-future gathering, originally set for Sept. 24-25. It is now put off a full year, to September 2021.
The bureau is releasing weekly reports on cancellations and rescheduling, and gathering grim numbers on hotel business across the city. While revenue per available room was off nearly 100 percent at downtown hotels some nights, bookings at other city hotels and motels were off by two-thirds or more.
One of the largest event cancellation by number of hotel bookings was the Arkansas FBLA gathering that would have been today and tomorrow, but those 1,300 room-nights are lost. Other big events scratched include the Arkansas Youth Conference, the 32nd Annual Community Easter Service and the 2020 USAG Men’s Gymnastics Region 3 Championship.
The biggest postponed event by hotel room bookings, the grandly named Biennial Supreme Session-General Grand Masonic Congress, will wait another biennium, having been put off from July 25 this year to July 2022. That event involved bookings of 1,860 room-nights, according to charts from the LRCVB.
Since March 12, date of the bureau’s first coronavirus cancellation, Hall has tracked a direct economic impact of nearly $2 million from delays of events that were projected to attract a total attendance of more than 33,000.
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