Restaurants fuel meetings-industry growth.

• Position: Special section: executive meetings and travel guide

As companies continue to loosen their travel and entertainment budgets, Colorado is well positioned to take advantage of the trend. The state's business meetings and conventions are not only on the upswing, but 2006 promises to be another growth year.

"Starting in 1999 and continuing through 2004, we saw companies cutting back or postponing both internal and external meetings," said Jim Steinbach, vice president of conference sales for the Vail Valley Chamber & Tourism Bureau.

"In 2005, we saw things open up and our meeting business rebound. Whether it was incentive travel to reward employees, off-site internal meetings, or meetings that included valuable clients and customers; companies were again spending money to make money." Confirmed bookings for 2006 for meetings in Vail and Beaver Creek are up 20 percent over 2005, Steinbach said.

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Denver also has plenty of reasons for optimism about the outlook for its conventions and business meetings. The new 1,100-room Hyatt hotel across the street from the Colorado Convention Center is scheduled to open by the end of 2005. Designed specifically as a convention headquarters hotel, the 37-story Hyatt will feature a 30,000-square-foot ballroom, a second ballroom half that size and a four-story atrium that covers an entire city block.

"The hotel is equally as important as the convention-center expansion," said Rich Grant, communication director for the Denver Metro Convention & Visitor Bureau. That expansion, completed in the fall of 2004, elevated the Colorado Convention Center to the 6th largest facility of its kind west of the Mississippi and the 15th largest in the nation.

But Grant says a first-class convention center and new hotel isn't enough to differentiate Denver from other cities competing for the same business travel dollars. Denver recently initiated a marketing strategy to promote Denver's wide array of restaurants. "Our skiing, mountains and all of Colorado's outdoor activities are a big selling point, but everybody eats," Grant said. "Studies have shown that restaurants are the single most important factor after the facility when deciding to bring a convention or meeting to a city."

Denver has had to overcome a perception that its restaurants didn't match up to those in comparable cities. "Among out-of-town convention planners who had never been to Denver, we ranked 23 out of 25," said restaurant consultant John Imbergamo. "There was a national perception that...