Hotels add art, whimsy to upgrade conference centers

Hotel conference centers are getting major makeovers to become spaces for both work and play.

Hotels across the country are spending millions of dollars to attract conferences by upgrading their meeting spaces. The rooms are no longer tucked away in dark underground corridors. Instead, they're appealing spaces often located on higher-level floors or even outdoors.

"There's definitely a shift in style," says Jayna Cooke, CEO of EVENTup, an online venue marketplace. She says meeting spaces are "wider, have taller ceilings, much more light and windows, and they're not stuck in basements and closed in."

Some examples:

The Mandarin Oriental, Las Vegas, has introduced a new meeting and event venue known as The Gallery. The 1,900-square-foot loft-style space has a 16-foot ceiling, frosted floor-to-ceiling windows and a painted cement floor. It can be used for meetings, seated dinners or cocktail receptions.

Pullman Hotels and Resorts, part of the Accor hotel brand, has created the Business Playground by Pullman concept. The conference table is actually a poker table that encourages people to place their hands or elbows on it for easier conversations. Canopy Break is a space that promotes informal discussions before meetings. The whole area has free wireless Internet, a large HD LED screen, and a mini-tablet to automate everything in the room.

The Radisson Blu Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia is in the middle of redesigning 17,000 square feet of meeting and event space. The hotel has an Experience Meetings program with new healthy menu options or Brain Food, free Internet and a Meetings App for planners to request room changes. The space will also include a Brain Box, a separate break room that the hotel says will have features to promote creativity, such as fidget toys to help meeting attendees deal with stress.

The new B Resort and Spa in Orlando has eight interior rooms for outside-the-box meetings, in addition to its 25,000 square feet of traditional conference facilities. One room is a theater that seats about 30 people, another is a library with an electric fireplace and cozy chairs, and yet another is a studio that can be used for yoga or other activities.

"We noticed that groups were incorporating interactive, fun and non-corporate activities into their meeting format and didn't want to spend their entire day in the boardroom," says Mary Hutchcraft, director of sales and marketing at B Resort and Spa. "We created these unique, customizable spaces to meet the demand of these groups."

Many of the hotels are also trying to design their conference centers to blend in with the destinations.

For instance, the Onmi Nashville Hotel is connected to the Country Music Hall of Fame on three levels and has a pedestrian pathway between the two structures.

Meeting spaces at the Alexander Hotel in Indianapolis showcase art curated by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The rooms are named after local neighborhoods. The wallpaper is a grid of Indianapolis streets. And the conference space has a communal area for attendees to try locally sourced food and drink.

Designers say they are responding to a demand from meeting planners for more cool and dynamic spaces.

For good reason. Business travel spending is expected to increase 6.2% to $310.2 billion this year, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Last year, it reached a record $292.2 billion.

Chris McDonough, senior design director at The Gettys Group, which is renovating the conference center at The Renaissance Chicago Downtown hotel, says planners want to blend social and functional space.

He and his team are creating transition spaces with views of the Chicago River that can be used for smaller meetings or as a pre-function area for a larger event. And to avoid having a typical drab arrival area, they are creating what they call an "artistic arrival" to evoke the feel of an art gallery rather than a hallway. They've commissioned fine art sculptures for the space.

"As meetings and conferences become more social, the spaces that contain them are changing as well," he says.