Hawaii Convention Center Pursues High-Tech, Asian Biz

<H1> Hawaii Convention Center Pursues High-Tech, Asian Biz</H1>By Maria Lenhart

<B>B</B>ill Gates, I'm coming after you." That's the message from Rick Chapman, head of the newly formed meetings and incentive sales division at the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, which is hoping Gates' Microsoft and other high-tech corporations will help fill the Hawaii Convention Center during its first two years of operation.

Scheduled to be fully open for business by July 1998, the convention center has plenty of short-term availability, with just one confirmed booking apiece for 1998 and 1999. In contrast, 2000 is shaping up as a strong year with seven large conventions confirmed to date.

"We got started too late to get much association business for the center's first months," said Chapman. To remedy the situation by picking up some short-term business, the HVB, which is handling all sales and marketing for the convention center, is targeting large corporate meetings and trade shows, particularly those that are in the high-tech industries and located on the West Coast. "The West Coast is already a strong market for Hawaii, and we'll be concentrating some of our efforts in places like the Silicon Valley, where companies have a long history of meeting here," said Chapman.

Sales and marketing efforts for the convention center were kicked off this spring and will continue in full force this year with sales blitzes and education programs in Chicago, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles. Also soon to be launched is a nationwide direct mail campaign.

For the high-tech market, the HVB is promoting the center as a state-of-the-art facility using the most advanced technology available. "While some older centers are now updating themselves technologically, we'll have the advantage of equipping ourselves from the ground up," Chapman said. "We'll have two multimedia theaters, fiber-optic telecommunications and key cards for entrance to the meeting rooms-a good security device which will also help with tracking attendance."

Other features such as translation capabilities in eight languages and a multilingual convention services staff are designed to position the center as a venue for mid-Pacific meetings drawing attendance from the U.S. mainland and Asia.

The center also is making an all-out pitch to the Asian market, particularly Japanese corporations, which tend to book meetings within a two-year lead time. "We have to emphasize our technology because we're competing with places like Singapore, Osaka and Tokyo, which have some of the best meetings facilities in the world," said Chapman.

Further promoting its technological orientation, the convention center will get its own interactive page on the HVB's Website (www.visit.hawaii.org) this summer. The page will enable planners to research available dates and will offer a booking form that can be sent electronically to the HVB sales department.