Evanston has signed on for another year of membership with Chicago’s North Shore Convention and Visitors Bureau (CNSCVB), this time at higher dues.
Aldermen approved a city allocation of roughly $78,810 to CNSCVB at their City Council meeting on May 9 covering a membership period running from July 1 through June 30 of next year.
CNSCVB is a convention and visitor bureau working with Evanston as well as a number of North Shore communities, promoting tourism and special events in those towns. Evanston is one of the charter members of the group, joining up when it was established in 2008.
The $78,810 membership fee represents a more than $15,000 increase from a year ago, staff pointed out in a memo. The higher contribution is a direct result of a new hotel, the Hyatt House Chicago/Evanston, at 1515 Chicago Ave., coming on board.
CNSCVB’s formula takes into account when a new hotel property “is built that adds inventory to the city,” said Gina Speckman, CNSCVB’s executive director, in a letter to the city, requesting the fiscal year membership dues. “The Hyatt House Chicago/Evanston Hotel joined the bureau last summer and has been actively engaging in our programs and selling the property well in advance of its opening.”
Speckman highlighted a number of gains Evanston has made in hotel occupancy and tourism during the last fiscal year in a presentation to the city’s Economic Development Committee on April 27.
Over the past fiscal year:
The occupancy of Evanston hotels increased by 4 percent and the average daily room rate charged was up $4.90.
The bureau co-hosted the One State Together in the Arts conference that took place last September at the Hotel Orrington, underwriting the buses which took all the attendees to all the different neighborhoods for the four or five different tours during the conference..
The group also worked with Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House whose program expanded for the first time last year beyond Chicago to include sites in Evanston as well. Local architect Jack Weiss had made an important connection brining the group here.
In two days, more than 16,000 Evanston site visits were made, and visitors hailed from 704 different zip codes, Speckman said.
“We really knew how important this event was because it was very well funded, they had a lot of advertising, ad sponsors support and social media,” Speckman said, “and if we could get them to venture outside the city limits of Chicago and come up to Evanston we would piggyback on all that branding.”
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