Mtgs. Facility To Secure Disney's Occupancy

<B> Mtgs. Facility To Secure Disney's Occupancy</B>

By Chris Davis

The Walt Disney World Resort has fired another salvo into the white-hot central Florida meetings marketplace (Meetings Today, March 22), with plans to open a 30,000-sq.-ft. enclosed pavilion as part of its millennium celebration at Epcot Center. The entertainment giant is authorizing use of the new space--the Epcot Festivities Pavilion--exclusively to groups staying in on-property Disney hotels, unless a booked affair is part of a citywide event that incorporates the Orange County Convention Center.

This move illustrates yet again the local focus on and competition for corporate meetings between Disney and main rival Universal Studios, which this spring opened its Escape theme park in Orlando. While there have been plenty of meetings and room nights to go around so far, with more than 76 percent of the city's hotel rooms booked in 1998, said Orlando/Orange County CVB president William Peeper, Disney's exclusive use of the pavilion demonstrates the company's intention to keep its own hotels in the loop with corporations that want to rent a part of the park for after-hours events.

The pavilion's opening is part of an extended Disney World promotion marking the year 2000. The inclusion of group space into the mix was critical, said Ann Hamilton, the park's director of resort sales. "At every single facility and attraction, we are asked to incorporate group events," she said. "We've never had a designated area of this size, where companies can put up their own pavilion under a single roof."

Disney's prime target for the pavilion, which will be open for a total of 15 months from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, 2000, are Fortune 500 companies, particularly those who want to hold a meeting or customer event with a millennium or future theme, Hamilton said. Dine-arounds are the most likely use of the pavilion, she speculated.

Corporate planners who have held meetings or customer events at theme parks before, said the parks offer facilities and attractions that other locations have difficulty matching. "We came to Epcot for the first time in 15 years this year," said Sharon Allan, convention director of Medic Computer Systems in Pittsburgh. "It was something new and exciting to get people to attend."

Allan said that theme parks eliminate a typical problem she often runs into: finding a venue that permits all her attendees to eat together. Theme parks can handle it, she said, whereas most standard sites cannot.

While much has been said about Disney's tough negotiating style, Allan said her expenditures at Epcot were "in line with what we had spent previously on this event at other locations and within our budget." She would not release any specific figures on the standard price for rental of the Epcot Festivities Pavilion.

Buddy Bevil, director of marketing and communications of Shaw Industries of Dalton, Ga., brought more than 1,000 of his company's carpet and floor dealers to Disney World in 1998 because the theme park was able to accommodate his primary need of a room big enough to handle both meeting and exhibition space. "It's in a preferred area of the country for us, the Southeast, and we encourage our dealers to bring their families, so it had the right atmosphere," Bevil said. "Since there's the theme parks and sporting facilities, there's something for everyone to do.