The occasion was a Guy Sebastian concert for 4,000 attendees rather than a conference, but it certainly demonstrated what the arena can do.
Despite the sizeable crowd, the concert felt like an intimate evening with great acoustics and no bad sight lines.
“Our centre is a little bit unique in the fact that it has an arena attached to it,” says GCCEC’s general manager, Nick Jeffrey.
“Most convention centres wouldn’t have that set up, maybe a theatre, but ours is a proper arena in the round, so that gives us the ability to do some entertainment as well as sporting events like boxing, basketball, netball.”
The arena can also be used for business events in several ways – as a conference plenary and split in half, accommodating a theatre and gala dinner setup simultaneously.
Jeffrey says the production of the Guy Sebastian concert can be replicated by GCCEC’s in-house team for business events audiences.
“The touring show…obviously provided most of the audio visual. But…our team could have provided the same and we have that equipment as well.
“So we could put on a show like that. And quite often we do in terms of a conference when they want to have a music act.”
Jeffrey says the centre punches above its weight in the business events industry, with the Gold Coast as a destination being a major draw for conferences.
“The Gold Coast [Convention and Exhibition Centre] runs more than half the business events in the state of Queensland even though we have two other large convention centres in the state.
“[This] year to date we’ve generated over $300 million in economic impact on the Gold Coast as measured continuously or comparatively to other states.
“And generally, in a full year we’ll do half a billion dollars in economic impact. So those are quite staggering numbers when you consider that the tourism industry on the Gold Coast as a whole is around about $9 billion.
“So from one property to be generating that sort of impact is quite staggering,” he said.
GCCEC played a significant role in the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, hosting basketball and netball at one end of the venue and 3,000 media representatives in a media hub at the other. When Brisbane hosts the Olympics in 2032, the convention centre looks set to host a slice of the action, although exactly which slice is not yet set in stone.
“We have had some inspections from the venues organising committee and we’re holding space for the Olympic Games,” says Jeffrey.
“The latest I heard was that we’re in line to run the volleyball, the indoor volleyball, as well as weightlifting. But we’ll see how we go, that’s still a fair way off.”
Back in the present, Jeffrey also discusses the impact of the Middle East conflict on GCCEC.
“We haven’t seen any cancellations,” he says.
“The delegate numbers… it’s hard to measure because we do see a lot of events underestimating what their delegate numbers will be.
“Something we have seen is just about every supplier is adding a fuel levy to obviously counter the fuel price increases…I think we’ve been okay to this point.
“I know some of our contemporaries in the major cities who do a lot more international events have seen some very real impacts in terms of delegate numbers dropping. But at this stage on the Gold Coast, we’ve been very lucky.”
