Success shows up clearly in the trend line – record revenue and room nights every year.

But failure shows up just as clearly in the numbers. By the end of this year, the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center will have lost more business in the last two years than it booked in the previous three.

Why? Simple. Not enough hotel rooms within walking distance of the convention center.

The world wants to see Tacoma. It just can’t find enough places to stay.

Consequently, since the beginning of last year, Tacoma has lost 53 conventions or trade shows with a combined 80,152 room nights. Or enough to fill the Hotel Murano and the Courtyard by Marriott for 171 straight nights.

All for lack of rooms.

So later this year, the city plans to have a hotel consultant write up a quick market analysis. Then the City Council will decide whether to dangle as bait the land it owns next to the convention center to attract a four-star hotel developer willing to build the city’s largest hotel – at least 400 rooms.

Meeting planners prefer to locate all their conventioneers in one property, said Carmen McIntyre, sales manager for the convention center. So, “in our dream world” we would have a signature hotel with 450 to 500 rooms built into the convention center.

“A convention center is only a convention center if you have the ability to attract outside groups and outside money to that community. Then it becomes an economic engine,” said David Bobo, general manager of the convention center.

Without more rooms, you might as well rename Bobo’s building the Greater Tacoma Conference Center, because to make enough money to pay its debt, it may need to market itself more to local groups who don’t require hotel rooms. But that doesn’t bring new money into the economy.

When Tacoma first started talking about a convention center in 1996, city leaders had a modest idea to expand the old Bicentennial Pavilion at the corner of South 13th and Market streets. But more than one consultant told officials they should build a convention center as big as they could possibly afford – and the conventions would follow.

So Tacoma built big. At the time, the GTCTC offered the second-largest convention center in Washington. Since then, Spokane’s center expanded to surpass Tacoma. But Spokane has roughly 4,000 hotel rooms downtown. Tacoma? Some 470 between the Marriott and the Murano.

Both those hotels rely on business and drop-in travelers more than conventioneers, who tend to get a discounted rate because they reserve rooms in big blocks.

“At any given time we’re lucky to get 50 rooms from the Marriott and 180 at Murano,” McIntyre said.

Tacoma planned for a future expansion of its convention center, too. The city bought enough property on Commerce Street across from Tollefson Plaza to build a near mirror image of the existing center some day.

But last week Mike Combs, director of public assembly facilities, told the City Council’s Economic Development Committee that property may work better primarily as a hotel site. When the city issues a request for proposals from hoteliers, it could incorporate a ballroom expansion and more meeting spaces to expand the GTCTC’s capacity.

“It’s our property. We own it, and it’s just sitting there,” Combs said.

But wait, you say? What about those other three promised hotels scattered around downtown?

 • The Foss Waterway Development Authority has worked for years on a hotel at the base of South 15th Street – not an easy walk uphill to the convention center. But that hotel has struggled to secure financing and currently has no certain development timetable.

 • The Winthrop Hotel, which Prium Properties purchased to eventually upgrade into a historic, signature hotel, still serves as a low-income apartment house. If Prium holds to terms of a $2 million loan from the city it used to by the Winthrop, it should notify tenants next month that they have one year to move out before Prium starts reconstruction, Mayor Bill Baarsma said. But that’s a big “if” in a down economy.

 • The developer of a potential hotel near the University of Washington Tacoma at South 21st and C streets has started negotiating design concepts with the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission.

But only The Winthrop would qualify as a potential prime convention hotel, Bobo said, due to its near door-to-door light rail connection with the convention center.

In his pitch last week to council members, Bobo tried to make his position as clear as possible. The three-year trend of better numbers of revenue and room nights has just about topped out, he said.

“The only thing standing in our way of more conventions … is hotel room capacity, inventory of hotel rooms,” he said. “That pretty much is – in a nutshell – what we’re going to need.”

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com