92 Business View Magazine - September 2016
and Leson says that it was mostly at the behest of the
city’s hotel operators who began witnessing a loss of
business due to the Center’s relatively small size. “It
was the hotels who pushed for the expansion and put-
ting a bond measure on the ballot allowing for a two
percent increase to the Transient Occupancy Tax to
finance the project. And due to the expansion, we’ve
been able to continue to grow with our clients’ needs.
We were even able to attract some of the groups that
we had lost.”
The Palm Springs Convention Center is owned by the
City of Palm Springs, but is managed by SMG, the
worldwide entertainment and convention manage-
ment company, which also manages the Palm Springs
Bureau of Tourism, the marketing arm for the city of
Palm Springs and the Convention Center. The Center
has 30 full- and part-time employees and sub-con-
tracts for audio/visual, catering, and security person-
nel.
Approximately 75 percent of the Center’s business
comes from associations – both California and nation-
ally-based. Leson explains that most of the corporate
businesses that come to Palm Springs tend to hold
their events at one of the area’s resort hotels because
they offer more amenities, such as golf and tennis; al-
though for the millennial generation, Leson believes
that these amenities are less important than their de-
sire for immersion in Palm Springs’ local culture.
The Center, itself, is physically attached to the Renais-
sance Palm Springs Hotel, which offers an additional
30,000 square feet of meeting space and 410 guest
rooms. “Because of our ability to offer sleeping rooms
and meeting space in one building, we’ve become a
very strong ‘association house,’” Leson explains. “It
makes it very easy for groups that are looking for a lot
of meeting space and hotel rooms that are under one
roof. We are kind of the perfect, first step for those
groups that are struggling with outgrowing hotels and
now have the need to move into a convention center.”
Because of our demographics, our Center does not do
a lot of consumer shows, “like you would see in big cit-
ies; we don’t have the population to support that here,”
Leson says. “This is one of the main reasons why con-
