Austin is ready to take on more conventions, but needs more rooms first

The Austin area is in line for more than a dozen hotels in the next two to three years, potentially putting an end to a shortage of rooms that tourism officials say has kept the city from landing many lucrative conventions in recent years. Combined, the hotels could make 4,000 or more additional rooms available for out-of-towners, also easing space crunches that occur during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, South by Southwest, Formula 1 events and University of Texas football games. The city currently has about 30,000 rooms, according to figures from the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, while nearby San Antonio, a longtime favorite of event planners, has an estimated 40,000 rooms. Convention and Visitors Bureau officials have for years said Austin has been missing out on larger convention groups because it had only one convention-size hotel, the 800-room Hilton Austin. Among the new hotel projects in the works are two 1,000-room convention hotels affiliated with high-end brands. Most of the hotels that are either under construction or have been proposed by developers are in downtown Austin, within walking distance of the Austin Convention Center. "Quite often, we had conventions that could be accommodated in our convention center ... however, we were missing that key second headquarter hotel to make the cut," said Steve Genovesi, the convention and visitors bureau's senior vice president of sales. "That's certainly not the case now. Given our new hotel inventory for the future, for the first time, Austin finds itself regularly competing with some of the nation's most popular convention cities, such as San Antonio, Nashville, San Francisco, New Orleans and even Orlando from time to time." In the past year, Genovesi says, there's been a 27 percent spike in groups considering hosting conventions in Austin, due