Corporate class at budget prices: businesses planning conferences and retreats at Colorado resorts can strike great deals this year as the hospitality industry tries to eke out a comeback.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Hospitality 2010 - Conference notes

For the hospitality industry, 2009 was like every fourth or fifth person died. Last year was like the last scene of the 1932 MGM movie "Grand Hotel," when John Barrymore's corpse is being carried out and Lewis Stone says, "Grand Hotel ... always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens," as a crowd rushes around the lobby.

Last year's Colorado convention, meeting, conference and corporate retreat business was down 15 percent to 20 percent or more overall, although, just as with real estate, it was not nearly so bad in Denver and the rest of the state as it was in Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

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"The state of the meeting industry here in Colorado is coming back," says Freddie Templeton of Castle Rock-based Rocky Mountain Event Consultants. "It was a scary year and a halt, but people still want to get together and network even when they're losing their jobs."

Bruce Alexander, Vectra Bank CEO and chairman of Visit Denver, the former Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau, looks at the numbers.

"If you look at last year's lodgers tax numbers, which are symbolic of what the hotels experience, they were off 15 percent to 20 percent," he says.

"People were really struggling keeping rooms full, people were laying off staff, even at the convention center. Here, at the convention and visitors bureau, we had to shrink our budget fairly dramatically because of revenues falling off," he adds.

For some perspective on the deeper meaning of all this, we started at the Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs.

The Broadmoor's ownership takes the long-term view, which might be why the Broadmoor has invested all along in its 1 85,000-plus total square feet of meeting space. This winter, that meant readying a major renovation of its West Tower meeting space for an April debut, and shutting down its still-new Broadmoor Cottages, which the hotel markets for corporate retreats, for tweaks and upgrades.

Yet, "The meetings business has been way off--not any great surprise," says Allison Scott, director of communications for the Broadmoor. Normally, the hotel's sales mix measures 70 percent business to 30 social, now Scott estimates the ratio probably is closer to 60-40.

This might help explain the Broadmoor Guarantee. After the stay of a new booking comprising 50 peak-room nights and a two-night minimum stay, "We send out a survey, and if your group agrees that we did not meet and exceed their expectations we pay them back." That...