Central Oregon tourism marketers have no trouble pitching to meeting and convention organizations, but still have work to do in encouraging the lucrative market to book here.

Convention travelers are valuable visitors. They tend to extend their stay after the meeting is over, which is generally during off-peak season — and they spend money.

But it’s a market that needs hotels, meeting spaces and easy access by car or plane to accommodate large groups of people in a short period of time.

“It’s a lucrative market,” said Linea Gagliano, director of global communications for Travel Oregon, the state’s tourism agency. “A lot of times people come early and stay late. They generally spend more than the average visitor demographics.”

It’s a hard segment of the tourism market to quantify in Central Oregon as many facilities are privately owned and consider who uses their meeting facilities and for how long proprietary information. Nationwide, however, the meeting and convention business contributed $325 billion in direct spending to the economy in 2016 for the purchase of goods and services, according to an Events Industry Council report. That is no small number and a market that many in the Central Oregon tourism business want to see a larger share of, tourism officials say.

In Oregon, 3.3 million people, about 10 percent of all the visitor arrivals in 2015, the most current year available, came on business, Gagliano said. No data exists for how many of those overnight visitors came to Central Oregon. But, 463,946 visitors came through the Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center, generating $35.5 million in visitor spending for 2015.

“Central Oregon is a real recreation paradise,” said Roxia Thornton Todoroff, Deschutes County Fair & Expo Center director of sales and marketing. “We are the playground of the Pacific Northwest. We call it ‘meetings with a view.’ Businesses choose us because of the wealth of fun things to do when they’re not in a conference center.”

It’s these kinds of numbers that make planners take notice, said Alana Hughson, Central Oregon Visitors Association president and CEO. It’s a particularly beneficial segment of the market when these events are booked in the off-peak season of October through May for Central Oregon, Hughson said.

“Tourism has many benefits,” said Erick Trachsel, director of sales and marketing at the Riverhouse on the Deschutes. “It helps create more jobs, brings in additional business for our local restaurants, retailers and transportation entities and generates additional tax dollars. It brings tourists into a community, gives it new life and creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to establish new services, products and facilities to help the region grow.”

At the Tetherow golf resort in Bend, the convention and meeting market often likes to incorporate the outdoor activities that Central Oregon offers into team building, said Kristi Ditullio, Tetherow golf resort’s director of sales.

“They’ll use hiking, biking, golf or cave tours and incorporate them into their team building,” Ditullio said. “We want to encourage more people to come during the off-season. We don’t have to do anything to encourage them to come during the summer.”

With most of the 4.3 million visitors to Central Oregon traveling by car and nearly three-fourths coming during the peak summer season, Bend, Redmond and Sunriver are attractive areas for meeting and convention travel, Hughson said.

But some say the area doesn’t have enough options for meeting spaces, and others say that there’s not enough lodging and late-night dining close to those meeting spaces.

Dominic Current, a Redmond resident and promoter of the National Physique Committee’s annual Cascadian Classic, a body-building and fitness-and-figure competition, plans to hold an event at the Riverhouse convention center on May 26. As a promoter, he said he thinks the area suffers from a shortage of affordable indoor stage spaces. His event draws about 300 athletes and 2,500 spectators.

For the past three years, the competition has been held at the Riverhouse, where the meeting space is adequate but parking is always an issue, Current said. For the one day of the competition, Current said he will pay $9,000 for the center rental plus the cost of lights and staging.

“All we get is the space, and we reserve a big chunk of rooms,” Current said. “That’s good for the hotels. To be honest, as cultural as Bend wants to be, there’s a lot lacking in facilities.”

The Expo Center doesn’t work for his event, he said, because it doesn’t have hotel space on property and the center’s policy is to collect the ticket sales and not disperse the funds until the event is over. For a small promoter like Current, that’s too much out of pocket before seeing any reimbursement.

At the county’s 320-acre Deschutes County fairgrounds, the meeting and convention business is a segment of the market it is trying to grow, Thornton Todoroff said. People have held every kind of meeting at the fairgrounds, she said, from sporting events to weddings, reunions and livestock and trade shows.

One of the standout groups coming to the fairgrounds will be the United Church of God conference, she said. It will draw more than 650 members to the conference center for nine days.

“That’s the kind of business we’re going after,” Thornton Todoroff said. “We want larger groups to come here.”

Another group that has booked is the Family Motor Coach Association, a convention of RV owners who bring their own accommodations with them. With them come 2,000 vendors, each needing hotel rooms, dining options and activities, she said.

“We have some challenges,” she said. “We don’t have any on-site hotels, and when we go after the large convention business that is our No. 1 challenge.”

In Sunriver, the meeting business is rolling along. Calls to Sunriver Resort were not returned, but Hughson said the resort will play host to about 500 golf course operators at the 2018 International Association of Golf Tour Operators North American conference in June. This kind of tourism in the early part of the peak summer season is an important facet of the region’s tourism, Hughson said.

“It will have immediate economic impacts for the region,” Hughson said. “Our role at COVA is to work to position the region as a competitive choice for the group market. It’s long been a component of our strategic plan.”

— Reporter, 541-633-2117; sroig@bendbulletin.com