A.C.'s CENTER OF ATTENTION

ATLANTIC CITY - Caesars Entertainment Inc. chairman Gary Loveman said the company's latest gambit - a new $126 million convention center that had its grand opening Thursday - was nearly five years in the making.

"It was sold to us by this guy here, [Caesars senior vice president] Michael Massari, in 2010, and he had to do some convincing," said Loveman, speaking on a raised stage behind the new Harrah's Atlantic City Waterfront Conference Center. "Well, he convinced us, and he has sold the property like he said he would."

Among the hopeful signs: Hotel room nights booked at this time last year were 7,000 at Harrah's Resort; they are up to 97,000 this year at the casino, the company said.

Bookings for meetings citywide were up 22 percent from a year ago, and room nights citywide were up 30 percent year-over-year, said James Wood, chief executive officer of Meet AC, the nonprofit created last year to plug meetings and conventions in the city.

Atlantic City has about 16,000 casino hotel rooms available, and filling them midweek during the non-summer months is particularly challenging. Demand drops after Labor Day, as it does throughout the Shore.

The new conference center adds 100,000 square feet of meeting space over two ballrooms and two floors, each measuring 50,000 square feet, making what the company called the largest conference center hotel in the Northeast.

Loveman and others said it is geared to attract a new type of customer as gaming revenue has tumbled with the closure of four casinos last year.

"We decided as gambling competition from Philadelphia and Maryland began to impact us, we were going after a different market segment," Loveman said. "We had to offer something else to get people here."

Stockton University finance professor Michael Busler said conventions and meetings were the type of non-gaming revenue sources the city needs to diversify its economy - which has relied almost entirely on gambling.

"This will help fill the hotel rooms and bring people to the Boardwalk in the non-summer months," Busler said. "Since the convention business is highly competitive, it will be a challenge to attract large conventions on a regular basis. But it will help."

The city is also facing about $500 million in debt, due mostly to casino tax appeals of property taxes.

The Northeast Corridor hosts $16 billion in meetings and convention business, but Atlantic City captures only 1 percent of that. The Harrah's center is going after this business.

"It's working," asserted Massari after Thursday's ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Since March, he said, Caesars has secured 73 additional groups, the equivalent of 38,000 room nights or $15.9 million in new business in signed contracts to use the new conference center at Harrah's between now and November 2019.

"This is a turn for the better for Atlantic City," said Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester), who was with Loveman and other Caesars executives on stage with Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian. "This center is part of its revitalization."

Among the groups that have committed to use the center are Rita's Italian Ice, the U.S. Air Force's Aerospace Medical Service, and Meeting Planners International, which had gone to Philadelphia previously but the Democratic National Convention next year left it too few rooms so the group is going with Atlantic City.

Massari said an incentive being offered to groups to pick Atlantic City is free shuttle service to and from Philadelphia International Airport.

Exhibits filled the first-floor ballroom for the Bradley Caldwell convention this week at the new center. The company is a distributor of farm, equine, home, pet, and other products.

Its 1,400 delegates booked 1,800 room nights with an economic impact of $1 million on the city economy, according to Harrah's sales reps.

Among them was Henry Vogt, 77, of Warwick, Bucks County, who works for a company that manufactures garden sprayers. He liked what he saw of the new convention center. He attended two days of the Bradley Caldwell Convention and left late Thursday.

"Not bad. Not bad at all," he said of the Conference Center. "It's better than the Taj convention center."

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