Puerto Rico Popular with Meetings Planners as Bookings Rise

The meetings and convention business in Puerto Rico has weathered the economic downturn better than most. For fiscal year 2008-09, which ended June 30, the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau reported a 20 percent increase in new bookings, generating more than $20 million in new conventions and meetings business for the destination.

The bookings represented a total of 264,156 room nights, according to Ana Maria Viscasillas, PRCB president and CEO. A one-day workers’ strike on Oct. 15 in San Juan –which was a peaceful, nonviolent work stoppage by all reports- caused nary a blip on the radar of the city’s meetings and convention business.

More than 50,000 workers gathered on strike day at the Plaza Las Americas, the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean, to protest government budget cuts that will eliminate 17,000 public-sector employees, including schoolteachers, health care workers and others as a means of closing Puerto Rico’s $3.2 million budget gap.

The first round of public-sector job cuts is expected to take place Nov. 6. Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate already was 15.8 percent in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in September.

While the strike clogged traffic in the heart of the city, disrupted surface transportation and required some hotels and resorts to find alternate means for their arriving and departing guests when taxis were unable to reach the hotels, the protest did not close San Juan’s airports or delay cruise sailings.

The PRCB will host the Latin American Congress of Pediatricians in November, welcoming more than 2,500 participants to the conference. Several equally large conventions are on the books for this winter and beyond.

Site inspections include detailed and focused itineraries tailored by the PRCB to reflect the requirements of the meetings planners and their clients. The inspections, of which about 150 are conducted a year, include tours of the convention center, which opened in November 2005; hotels that are equipped to handle large blocs of delegates; and visits to event sites for social gatherings, off-site venues and restaurants, museums and attractions, such as the visitors center of El Yunque National Forest.