Atlantic City to lose 4,400 hotel rooms

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Written by Linda Hohnholz

ATLANTIC CITY, NJ – September will be a devastating month for New Jersey’s Atlantic City, once a seaside gaming mecca for the whole East Coast.

ATLANTIC CITY, NJ – September will be a devastating month for New Jersey’s Atlantic City, once a seaside gaming mecca for the whole East Coast. The iconic Showboat casino closed on Sunday, August 31; Revel closed early on Tuesday morning and Trump Plaza is set to shut down in the next few weeks.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, the four casino closures this year โ€” including the Atlantic Club which closed in January โ€” will take about 4,400 hotel rooms out of the market, about a fourth of the city’s inventory. Atlantic City will be left with 13,436 rooms by mid-September.

Taking a cue from Las Vegas, the city is reaching out for convention businessโ€”but, as the article notes, the hotel closures may make room availability a problem for large-scale events.

“The available inventory will shrink by 20 percent, so the existing operators have to contribute more rooms if we are going after the mega-city-wide conventions,” Jim Wood, chief executive of the new Meet AC entity, told the Inquirer. “They will have to provide a larger room block.”

Those 13,436 rooms will not be enough to attract large-scale conventions, the story notes, and only about 8,000 of these will be available for conventions, according to Wood.

Nearby, Center City Philadelphia has 11,400 rooms and Baltimore about 10,000 available for conferences, making them much more attractive targets for city-wide events.

As MeetAC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the city for business functions, noted in July, the first half of 2014 alone saw 41 events held at the Atlantic City Convention Center. These attracted nearly 220,000 delegates, who used more than 46,000 room nights and generated delegate spending of $68.5 million. The CRDA’s convention sales staff also booked an additional 35 events at other facilities throughout the city that attracted nearly 29,000 delegates who used 18,000 room nights and generated $13.5 million.

Still, it is worth noting that conventions and meetings make up less than 10 percent of the city’s revenue, and even under the best of circumstances, a loss of rooms (and the ensuing negative publicity) will be hard to spin as a positive for event planners.

John Palmieri, who leads the New Jersey state redevelopment efforts in Atlantic City, summed the situation up for the Wall Street Journal: “Looking back, people should have been preparing for this day for the past couple of decades.”

About the author

Avatar of Linda Hohnholz

Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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