Interior Conferences and Meetings: Small- and mid-sized venues in Fairbanks.

• Author: Friedman, Sam
• Position: VISITOR INDUSTRY - Conference news

Fairbanks has enough meeting venues that it takes more than a clay just to walk through all the ballrooms, reception areas, and board rooms.

Fairbanks-area meeting planners know this because they spent nine hours on a bus tour in March getting a feel for a sample of the region's venues; tourism and meeting promotion organization Explore Fairbanks holds at least one of these tours every year.

This year, along the way, the bus stopped at twelve meeting venues. That's by no means a comprehensive lour, says Helen Renfrew, director of meetings and conventions at Explore Fairbanks.

"It's kind of like the top-of-mind places for accommodating and/or meeting and convention space, because we can't see everything Fairbanks has lo olfer over one full day," she says.

For those who want their own look at the venues, Explore Fairbanks sets up customized meeting venue walkthroughs for prospective meeting planners, usually at no or little cost to the meeting planner. About ten of these adhoc tours take place each year. The organization also helps meeting planners comparison shop between venues by inviting venues to bid on requests for proposals created by meeting planners with help from Explore Fairbanks.

Fairbanks lacks a large convention center like Anchorage's Dena'ina Center, so it's hard for the city to host large conventions of more than 450 attendees, Renfrew says. Hut the city hosts a few large conventions and hundreds of small-to-medium meetings each year. Over the last five years, Fairbanks hosted an average of 313 meetings per year. Each year, these meetings used an average of 27,480 hotel room nights and directly contributed $9.2 million to the local economy, according to Explore Fairbanks numbers.

Here's a look at a few meeting venues featured in the March tour. For more information about these and other venues, see the Explore Fairbanks forty-page meeting guide at explorefairbanks.com

Westmark Hotel Meeting space: More than 11.800 square feet of meeting space year-round, more than 17,000 square feet in winter Guest rooms: 400 Food: Onsite catering Past events: State Republican Parly convention, Alaska Library Association conference, Alaska Peony Growers Association conference The Westmark Hotel boasts both the largest hotel ballroom in Fairbanks and one of the largest inventories of smaller rooms. The downtown hotel conference space occupies an entire wing of the hotel and can be accessed through the lobby or directly from the hotel's back parking lot.

The Gold Room is a 5,400-square-foot ballroom that can be rented in its entirety or broken down into thirds. Around it are eight smaller rooms ranging in size from 2,080 to 263 square teet.

Unlike Holland...