Hotel owner seeking information about winning convention bids - Rapid City Journal
One of the city's biggest hotel management firms is at odds with the Convention and Visitors Bureau over what it says should be public information.
ISIS Hospitality wants the tourism marketing group to release information the bureau maintains is private: the room rate offered by hotels that win the competitive bidding process for hosting conventions that come to Rapid City.
The bureau, a division of the Rapid City Area Chamber of Commerce, maintains that the convention contracts are proprietary information between private businesses.
Hoteliers at a Monday meeting agreed, and said no other hotels are asking for the information.
"Only ISIS has this concern," said Diane Heinis, owner of the Comfort Suites, Comfort Inn and Days Inn.
Bureau attorney Gary Jensen said the group has no plans to make the information public.
ISIS chief executive officer Rich Dunkelberger said his firm started seeking the information when the manager of the Fairfield Inn and Suites determined she had been unable to win group business despite what ISIS thought were "compelling" rates on a new, well-appointed property.
Initial information provided ISIS by the bureau showed the company was not awarded any of the 108 contracts it bid on, but the bureau would not say what the winning rates were.
"In essence, we believe it should not be confidential, just as in the city bidding process the winning bids are always revealed when the project has been awarded," Dunkelberger said. "We feel very strongly that revealing this information creates a transparent process and upholds the integrity of that process."
"The CVB is not a government agency," Jensen said. "Public record statutes do not apply."
But ISIS attorney Jennifer Trucano said the bureau is bound to turn over the documents because it receives tourism marketing dollars through the city's hotel business improvement district, a taxing body created under city statute that collects $2 per night's stay from hotels in the district.
The district includes more than 30 hotels and more than 3,500 rooms. In 2010 it raised more than $1.2 million for the bureau.
Trucano said ISIS believes the bureau is a legal subunit of the district's board of directors for the purpose of spending tax money in part to recruit conferences to town.
ISIS Hospitality's Rapid City properties are the Hotel Alex Johnson, AmericInn & Suites, Country Inn & Suites, Fairfield Inn & Suites, and LaQuinta Inn & Suites.
The discussion was the only agenda item at a Monday morning meeting of the hotel business improvement district board. Chairman Craig Christianson, owner of the Hampton Inn and Microtel, didn't say what the board would do to address ISIS' request, which Trucano said the firm had been making for four months.
"I think this will be a continuing dialogue," Christianson said.
Contact Barbara Soderlin at 394-8417 or barbara.soderlin@rapidcityjournal.com.
30 Aug, 2011--
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