Corporations Building Conference Centers Once Again

After a several-year hiatus, some major companies again are building corporate conference centers to support internal training programs and cut costs.

Government defense contractor Lockheed Martin is building an onsite conference center with 183 sleeping rooms for its Bethesda, Md., headquarters and accounting firm KPMG is planning to open a new conference center at the company's Montvale, N.J., location in the spring of 2010.

While many companies turned away from self-owned conference centers in recent years, they have been making somewhat of a comeback recently, said Tom Bolman, executive vice president of the International Association of Conference Centers.

"Usually the real thing that fuels them is the ability to infuse their own culture. They can get what they want in terms of meeting space and accessories," he said. "There's been a trend over the past 10 years of corporations not wanting to own that asset. This is kind of a new wave."

Mark DiPiero, senior vice president of global acquisitions for conference center company Dolce International, said he had been contacted over the past four months by companies wanting to understand the value of a corporate conference center. "I'm seeing a trend of resurgence," he said.

Called the Center for Leadership Excellence, Lockheed Martin's conference center will provide space for employee training sessions, said Dennis Shanahan, the center's director. "We have an extensive leadership development program," Shanahan said, adding that training "plays a very strategic role in our ability to maintain the integrity of the work that we do for our customers."

The center will have 101,000 square feet of meeting space and is scheduled to open in early 2009. Lockheed Martin selected Benchmark Hospitality International to manage the center.

"We'll provide all the hospitality services within the facility," said Benchmark vice president Ellen Sinclair. Benchmark will have a team of conference planners working with a point of contact at Lockheed to set up meetings.

"We will be working closely with them to book all the classes, reserve meeting space and book the overnight guest rooms," Sinclair said.

The location of the center on the Lockheed Martin campus makes it "the total experience for our employees," Shanahan said. "The center is adjacent to corporate headquarters, so they'll have the opportunity to network with other employees and corporate executives."

Cost savings and hotel availability also were motivating factors. "We spend a lot of money on renting meeting facilities around the country, not only for training classes," Shanahan said. "Economically, having the resources to host our own senior management meetings and conferences and our own private lodging facility provides a very strong business case." Lockheed declined to disclose the cost of the conference center.

With new meeting space comes new policy surrounding its use. For Lockheed, the travel department will work to maximize the utilization of the new center, and there will be a mandate to hold area meetings there if space is available.

The center will be accessible through the company's Travelocity Business online booking tool, which will be programmed to encourage booking of available center space, said Richard Wooten, Lockheed director of corporate travel services.

"If there's inventory available at the center for transient use, that's going to pop up at the top of the list and they will be directed to use that first," Wooten said, adding that noncompliant travelers would be targeted. "We'll be able to match the data and, if it wasn't completely sold out, we'll be able to look at those dates from our corporate card data, identify those individuals and help educate." Wooten said excess inventory would be available in global distribution systems for Lockheed travelers.

Like the Lockheed Martin center, KPMG's conference center will have a mix of conference rooms along with a larger space for training meetings and will not be open to other companies or the public.

Unlike Lockheed, KPMG's center only will offer space for meetings of less than 500 people. The company will handle sleeping room needs offsite, said Cyndi Bruce, director of management services the Center for Learning and Development, KPMG's training organization. Training meetings will receive first priority and any other available space is open to anyone in the firm.

"It will be a joint effort of looking at what requests are coming in, what the availability is, and how to best utilize the space," Bruce said.

The accounting and consulting company has not yet made a decision as to whether to outsource the management of the center or to keep it in-house. "As a result of our analysis, we do anticipate some cost savings based on this approach and we hope this is an outcome, but it wasn't our focus going in," Bruce said. "Our main impetus was aligning with our strategic plan of retaining the best and the brightest."