Bookings down at Georgia World Congress Center

Although 2009 hasn’t even arrived, Dan Graveline is looking ahead to 2010 and right now, he said, it isn’t looking good.

The executive director of the Georgia World Congress Center released on Tuesday the fiscal 2010 preliminary budget for the massive downtown convention center. In it, he says convention and trade show revenue could be down $3.5 million.

The reason: the economy, according to most in the industry, will still be soft, with attendance down and the number of booths, which pays a lot of the rent for meetings, will be fewer than in the past.

“While we need to be concerned, we don’t need to panic,” said Graveline, stressing that the forecast is a snapshot of how things look right now. “This is all preliminary. We will submit the final budget for 2010 in May.”

Fiscal 2010 begins July 1, 2009, and ends June 30, 2010.

The GWCC’s health is crucial to metro Atlanta’s $11.4 billion tourism industry. Thousands visit the city every year for trade shows and conventions, spending millions on hotels, restaurants and retail.

One sign of trouble, Graveline said, is a two-week gap next year in February when the GWCC has no business booked. January through March are some of the busiest months for the center.

“There’s some anomaly here,” he said.

In the preliminary 2010 budget, staff would get a 2 percent raise while the facility would freeze or not fill the equivalent of 40 positions, Graveline said.

“If this doesn’t improve we will downgrade that to nothing,” Graveline said about raises.

Contributing to the dismal outlook are concerns the industry may have overbuilt the number of convention centers and a perception that it will take 12 to 18 months before there is an economic recovery, Graveline said.

“All not good trends for us,” he said.

The GWCC for the past few years have bucked Graveline’s dire predictions, pulling in more money than expected at the end of the year. The facility, the fourth largest convention center in the country, ended fiscal 2008 with a profit of about $2.4 million.

Graveline expects the center to break even this year.