Hartford Business Journal

19 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | March 14, 2022 However, public, consumer-driven shows are making a comeback. The Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Connecticut hosted its home show earlier this month and the New England Concrete Manufacturers Association has a convention center event scheduled for March 16 and 17. While trade shows are back, Costelli said attendance has been slightly lower than pre-pandemic levels, possibly a result of people still being tentative about attending in- person events. In a typical year, the Connecticut Convention Center hosts about 130 events with more than 320,000 visitors. Costelli said the casinos and Providence Convention Center are his facility's biggest competitors. The Bristol Event Center will have space for large business conferences, weddings and galas, but Costelli said he doesn't expect it to directly compete with the convention center. "They're really not going to be going after the type of business that we are," Costelli said. He said casinos have been increasingly branching out into hosting public shows and corporate meetings rather than just concerts and sporting events. Just a few years ago, Mohegan Sun opened an $80 million, 240,000-square-foot expo and convention center and was able to poach the Connecticut International Auto Show away from the convention center in Hartford. It later also poached the Hartford Boat Show. "I see [casinos] being more competitive in the future than they have been to this point," Costelli said. "They get to offer things like free parking, an abundance of entertainment for people in their off- time, which presents a challenge." What the convention center offers is good service and clean, organized facilities, Costelli said. Food and beverage services are also done in-house, and the downtown Hartford location and highway adjacency are something the facility promotes. With 20 loading bays around the building, just about anything can fit into the facility, he said. Costelli said the addition of more hotel rooms downtown would help the convention center's competitive position. A 2019 study commissioned by the Capital Region Development Authority recommended downtown Hartford add a new 400-room hotel to boost the market. But that was before the pandemic decimated Hartford's lodging industry, forcing several hotels to close or shrink their number of available rooms. "That's a big deal because unfortunately the hotel market is shrinking rather than growing," Costelli said. XL Center Meantime, the XL Center in Hartford has been working to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Ben Weiss, general manager of the XL Center, said the live events industry was one of the first to shut down in March 2020, and one of the last to get back up and running since then. "We're in the business of putting people together," Weiss said. "Our industry really has been crushed." Weiss said business started to normalize in the fall before the omicron variant caused a hiccup, but things are now looking up. He said attendance for the Hartford Wolf Pack hockey team is back to pre-pandemic levels, and UConn basketball had a sold out game versus Villanova on Feb. 22. "The last couple Saturday nights we've had 5,000 tickets sold and the lower bowl is packed," Weiss said of Wolf Pack games. "There's great energy, and people are excited to be out." The XL Center primarily hosts concerts, shows and sporting events, and Weiss said that industry looks to be back in full gear this spring and summer. Most performers and live event tours are no longer delaying their events schedule, he said. "There's going to be a tremendous amount of touring business back out on the road full time," Weiss said. Weiss said he and his team are still mapping out their 2022 calendar and there's a lot of interest in bringing shows to the region. In addition, the XL Center usually books about 15 convention and exhibit-style events a year, which Weiss said are beginning to come back as well. Ben Weiss is the general manager of the XL Center. HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER TOTAL PROJECT SIZE: 25,000 SF Building For Your Success ABLE COIL BOLTON, CT For over 55 years, metal buildings have been a staple of PDS. For this project, we were tasked by Able Coil to build a new state of the art pre-engineered metal office building and renovate their existing 20,000 square foot building into a new manufacturing facility in Bolton CT. Complete with multiple new offices and several specialty rooms, the exterior finish is a multifaceted design complete with Nichiha Vintage Cement siding and ACM paneling, full length store front windows and stone veneer. Structural upgrades to the existing building were necessary to bring it up to code and to support the new solar panel system. With in-house engineering, PDS can design the right building to fit your budget and timeline. SPOTLIGHT ON: PRE-ENGINEERED METAL BUILDINGS 107 Old Windsor Road, Bloomfield, CT 06002 | 860.242.8586 | pdsec.com THINK • PLAN • BUILD

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