PE.com - Tourism Blog

Conventional Spending

The Palm Springs Desert Resorts (Communities) Convention and Visitors Authority, from here after known as the PSDRCCVA ... OK scratch that ... the authority (with no Big Brother connotations) has helped the Destination Management Association International group figure out how much a typical convention-goer spends.

According to their calculations, if you or I were attending a convention we'd spend $262 per day for an event lasting 3.6 nights. About 77% of that is spent on hotels, food and spirits. The remaining $60 dollars a day? My guess: shoes and overpriced print outs that should've been done on your home printer but were forgotten and now being printed at the hotel's business center.

As a result of the study though, authorities like the Desert Resorts...etc can now use a handy equation to figure out how much money communities might be making from conventions.

# of room nights X # of convention-goers per room X spending per day = direct revenue impact.

For example, in 2006 the city of Palm Springs had:

116,492 room nights X 1.75 convention-goers per room (1 tall person, 1 short person perhaps?) X $262 = $53,411,582 spent in Palm Springs

The same formula said the city of Desert Hot Springs had just 171,938 spent within the city last year.

The authority votes Friday whether to approve the formula to calculate the area's tourism impact.

Does spending $262 a day seem reasonable?

-- KIMBERLY PIERCEALL
kpierceall@PE.com