The Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority (CRVA) is the parent company for Charlotte’s sales and marketing arm, Visit Charlotte, the Charlotte Convention Center and several other city venues. During this challenging time, the organization is working to keep the health, safety and wellbeing of its meeting industry clients top-of-mind. There are many reasons to think Charlotte for safe meetings in 2021 and beyond.
Following are just a few:
We Clean With Care
The CRVA has been working diligently to revamp cleaning, sanitization and disinfecting processes, and has just implemented new cleanliness and safety technologies in its venues such as needlepoint bipolar ionization (NPBI), which delivers safer, cleaner indoor air by reducing harmful particles and pathogens like COVID-19. The CRVA is among the first in the meetings and conventions industry to implement NPBI technology in its venues. In addition, thermal cameras have been added to continuously measure body temperatures and help conduct more efficient health screenings.
These efforts are part of the “We Clean with Care” program, which strives to provide guests with sound peace of mind when stepping foot in CRVA venues and visibly see the steps the organization has made toward maintaining exceptional, health-conscious conditions. Extensive venue-wide signage and new facility protocols and policies have been implemented as part of this program.
The CRVA has also attained the Global Biorisk Advisory Council® (GBAC) STAR™ accreditation for its managed venues: the Charlotte Convention Center, NASCAR Hall of Fame, the Bojangles Entertainment Complex and the Spectrum Center—an important third-party accreditation that sends a powerful message to meeting planners, individual travelers and employees about each facility’s elevated cleaning protocols.
Expanded Convention Center
An exciting $126.9 million expansion of the Charlotte Convention Center will be completed by summer 2021, adding approximately 50,000 sf of meeting room and pre-function space. In addition, an over-street pedestrian walkway to the 700-room Westin Charlotte provides enhanced connectivity to this bustling convention district. This expansion brings the total individual breakout spaces to 55, which includes the Crown Ballroom, 50 meeting rooms and the ability to divide the 35,000-sf ballroom into four 7,700-sf breakout spaces. The flexible meeting space related to the expansion will include two 10,000-sf spaces each divisible into 19 different configurations with seating capacities from 200-1,200 theater-style.
Vibrant Hotel Scene
With 6,040 hotel rooms within walking distance of the Convention Center, in the compact convention district, you’ll find a hotel or meeting space to accommodate every request. New additions to the Uptown cityscape include the Marriott Autograph Collection Grand Bohemian Hotel (now open), the JW Marriott Charlotte, Even Hotels Charlotte, InterContinental Charlotte and Homewood Suites by Hilton Charlotte Uptown. These additions will add 964 additional rooms within walking distance to the Charlotte Convention Center. And with museums, restaurants, retail shops, sporting events and performance venues and more all within blocks of one another, Charlotte’s convention corridor is compact and walkable for meeting attendees.
Charlotte 10
This program, first unveiled in 2018, has been extended throughout 2021. For meeting planners booking 100 hotel rooms or more, they can book their group’s stay up until December 31, 2021, and receive a $10 rebate—$5 from your hotel and $5 from Visit Charlotte—for each room.
One CRVA
Because the CRVA recognizes the need for customized and/or flexible solutions to meet event needs in the current environment, the organization touts the “One CRVA” approach, which taps the shared knowledge and resources it uses to skillfully manage multiple venues and varying types of guest experiences. This collective and consistent knowledge in understanding how visitors experience a city in multifaceted ways has helped elevate health and safety protocols and prepared CRVA to provide clients with innovative, one-stop-shop solutions when booking.
