A downtown hotel/conference center is at the top of the wish list for Rebekah Snider, the executive director of the Milledgeville-Baldwin County Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“I see that as our No. 1 hospitality need,” Snider said, “and we’d like to see it downtown. We believe that with the amount of college business we already have, and with the way meetings function with their expectations for food and beverage, downtown makes the most sense.”
Where downtown would a hotel/conference center go?
“There are multiple locations where I feel like it would be really nice,” Snider said. “None are currently available — nothing that’s not going to require some acquisition and demolition. So, I don’t want to name just one (preferred) location.”
Snider said the hotel/conference center would probably be privately owned, “but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be incentivized in some way. That’d be for elected officials to decide. We are interested in helping them recognize that other people (in other cities) are offering tools to help leverage a product.”
A downtown hotel/conference center would elevate retail and dining options because it would provide a customer base that is different from college students, she said.
Such a facility might take a while, but the hospitality business already is booming in Milledgeville. There’s a big need for more hotel rooms.
“I think it will shock people to know that we’re so busy right now that there are multiple weekends when we are displacing business to other communities because our market (680 rooms) is sold out,” Snider said.
The hospitality business in Milledgeville — and the state of Georgia — took a big hit in the COVID years of 2020 and 2021 after a record year in 2019. But it rebounded successfully — “better…
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