How One Convention Center Has Become a Place Where People Actually Want to Hang Out
Written by David McMillin
Let's face it: Many convention centers aren't the hippest spots in the world. To meet the expectations of attendees, however, that needs to change. Ballrooms and exhibit halls need to be reimagined as spaces that feel more like an exclusive members' club and less like a traditional professional environment. That may sound challenging, but it's already happening at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center.
Take a look at how this kind of design can transform an event and follow along for the evolution of this SoCal convention style.
A pickleball court, a disc golf course, and a putting green at the Charlotte headquarters of financial services company Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association. A speakeasy at the Dallas headquarters of Stonebriar Commercial Finance. Yoga and meditation areas at J.P. Morgan's New York headquarters. Today's 9-to-5 spaces are beginning to look a lot more like after-hours areas for relaxing and recreation.
Why are employers investing so much money to make work not feel like work? Because they have to. According to research from Resume Builder, one out of five employees are continuing to ignore a company's requirement to go to the office, and around half plan to quit if their company starts enforcing compliance.
Rather than making going to the office a chore, some companies are making it feel like a reward. The trend of transforming traditional workspaces into more fun and engaging environments has a name: "hotelification," but the approach isn't confined to the Monday-Friday crowd. The events industry can take a cue too. One destination has been well ahead of the curve, putting this kind of spin on its convention center spaces well before organizations started enticing remote workers back to the office after the pandemic. More than a decade before The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were reporting on the hotelified take in corporate design, convention leaders in Long Beach, California, were breaking with tradition to deliver a new kind of experience. When Visit Long Beach CEO Steve Goodling shows off the city's convention center, he sums up his inspiration simply as it's a space where "a convention can feel a little bit cool."
"The journey for convention centers is to take what looks industrial and embrace it," said Goodling, who has a keen appreciation of hospitality design after spending more than 20 years with Marriott International and Shangri-La Hotels prior to leading Long Beach. "You're not going to turn it into a luxury unit, but you embrace it and you celebrate it. You find wasy to bring it to life with the right lighting, the right furniture, and the right art. You make it cool."
For Long Beach, the journey to that coolness began in 2009 when Goodling watched the organizers of the annual TED Conference reimagine the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center spaces for the iconic event's debut in Long Beach after being held for years in Monterey, California. Previously, the convention center back entrance area had been nothing more than a service road next to a parking garage, but TED organizers had a bold new vision: Close the streets to vehicles, hang glistening chandeliers, park food trucks, and build some LED-lit paper-mache bars.
"All of a sudden it looked like an urban club with a mix of cyrstal and cement," Goodling said.
Later editions of the conference continued to build on what Goodling calls a "corporate-style party" atmosphere with white lounge furniture and booths that would look more at home in a trendy nightclub than in a convention center arena.
In addition to being impressed by the magic of TED's evening experiences, Goodling was awed by its program during the day. "In my world, you'd sit in the front row if you were the good student," Goodling said. "You were there, and you were present. At TED, everyone was walking around and talking on the phone, and it was okay. TED treated everyone like an adult. If you want to participate in an ancillary space out front, cool. If you want to do it in the lobby, cool. If you want to sit in the front row, cool. It was the attendee's choice."
Participants had a lot of options to choose from, with programming spread out across the center's 46,000-square-foot arena, the 3,000-seat Terrace Theater, and the 825-seat Beverly O'Neill Theater, as well as experiences to explore—from baristas stationed throughout the center's prefunction area and a pop-up library, to outdoor sponsored tents. All of which served to invoke the feeling among participants that's common when staying at a high-end hotel: I never want to leave.
Attendees who stay at the recently renovated Fairmont Breakers next door to the convention center may stroll across the Rainbow Bridge during the day, but at night, they have reason to stick around and celebrate beneath thousands of LED lights that create a lounge-area for receptions with the best kind of canopy: California's star-studded sky.
Once a venue that welcomed the likes of James Brown and other hitmakers of the '70s and '80s, by the early 2000s the Long Beach Arena's utilization rates had dropped to less than 20 percent. Now, it's back in full circulation, catering to events. A ceiling truss system gives clients more flexibility to tailor the space to meet their needs and accomplish what TED organizers always prioritized: Make the room feel packed. The stunning globes add another dimention of Instagrammability while eliminating the need to rent any additional lighting elements.
What used to be a concrete underbelly is now The Cove—a space where attendees can savor southern California fare from food trucks while feeling the rhythm of a DJ set and snapping photos beneath six crystal chandeliers. That kind of party atmosphere is enough to make some attendees do a double take.
"We had one prominent scientist walk by, see the party, and assume it must be for some other group," Scott Steen, CEO of the American Physiological Society (APS), said after hosting the organization's annual meeting in Long Beach in 2023. "He thought there was no way [the society] did all this for us."
After holding its annual U.S. gathering of the extended reality (XR) community for 14 years at the Santa Clara Convention Center, AWE XR had a problem, said Andrea Lowery, AWE XR's chief operating officer. But it was a good one to have: They needed more room.
Finding more space wasn't Lowery's only objective, however. The ability to be more creative was also a key priority, as some of the program's biggest financial supporters wanted to be able to explore new ways of connecting with attendees. "Not all our sponsors want to do a traditional booth space," Lowery said.
They found the additional square footage—and the flexibility—in Long Beach, which will serve as the conference's home through 2027. For example, Snap, one of the event's biggest supporters, is looking at expanding the creative "non-traditional" activation that they had in the center's Promenade Lobby in 2024, potentially taking some of it outdoors in 2025.
In addition to offering sponsors new opportunities, Lowery needed to create a sense of nostalgia for long-time attendees. "This event often gets described as a 'reunion,'" she said. "We want an environment that celebrates that spirit."
For Lowery, the Long Beach Convention Center's abundance of natural light paired with a cast of sculptures that mimic the feel of a contemporary art museum were the perfect match. "We hosted a party in The Cove, and the Long Beach Convention Center generously added a bunch of built-in amenities to create the vibe," she said. "There was a giraffe sculpture and a chandelier that some might think was a bit weird, but we like weird. In fact, the weirder, the better."
The convention center's convenient location—smack in the middle of downtown—helped extend the celebration and translated to an array of after-party opportunities. Sponsors hosted events at bowling alleys, bars, and art museums. "From the attendee's perspective, Long Beach is very walkable," Lowery said. "They don't need to deal with a long Uber ride."
Another highlight from the first Long Beach edition was the opportunity to take technology breaks. While that may sound surprising, Lowery said that attendees have asked for white space in programming to simply connect with each other. "They've said they want to recharge and they want time to just chat," Lowery said.
In 2004, they did exactly that with a two-mile wellness walk. In the middle of the day, attendees were invited to meet outside the convention center for a guided stroll through the city. "It was just regular people chatting and being outside," Lowery said. "Long Beach gives us the options our attendees want without even really trying. Those possibilities are just already there."
Goodling highlighted that the TED Conference blossomed before social media dominated every facet of our lives. While attendees weren't automatically sharing every photo they snapped in TED's early days, he said that the organizers embraced the need to infuse every experience with energy that makes anyone who skipped out regret their decision. "If you weren't there," Goodling said, "you were really going to miss out."
Fifteen years later, the building manages to check a more in-the-moment box for a convention center: It's Instagrammable. With its fluorescent-lit green walls that would remind you of an activation at Coachella, spaceship-style swing chairs, and high-end sofas under twinkling chandeliers that could easily double as the set for a Taylor Swift music video, every nook of the center is designed to be worthy of appearing in someone's social feed. "Attendees don't want cookie cutter," Goodling said. "They want to know that they're someplace special. They want to be able to share it. Otherwise, why be there?"
The real magic at a meeting is often found during downtime, and well-designed event venues make the most important piece of the puzzle—finding a place to relax—easy. There are dozens of places to sit down in the Long Beach Convention Center "and actually catch up with friends or meet new people," APS CEO Scott Steen said. "It is an entirely different vibe than most convention centers where you might be walking for 500 yards or more until you find an uncomfortable chair."
When those attendees aren't sitting, they should be dancing—at least part of the time. Goodling said that when the Emergency Managers Association held an event at the convention center, organizers made one thing clear: These attendees don't dance. "I said, 'You don't have to dance, but you have to have music,'" Goodling said. "We even covered the cost of the DJ as part of our negotiations. Within 20 minutes, the group started to dance. When you give organizations that never have these types of social interconnecting experiences and they embrace it, that's what excites me."
At the APS Summit, the science is the main draw, particularly for researchers who are looking to present their own work, but the format has embraced some elements that are miles away from an abstract poster—including puppy play areas and three-dimensional selfie stations. "Scientists pretend that they aren't influenced by the entertainment experience, but they all loved it," Steen said, reflecting on one area—the middle of the exhibit hall with two full-size pickleball courts—that was packed during every minute of the meeting.
When TED loaded out each year, many of the touches that added up to such a unique experience disappeared too. Goodling recognized an opportunity to make the building a permanent space where organizers could avoid the typical add-on costs of rentals that wreak havoc on annual meeting budgets. After working with an architect to develop a proposal for new floor lighting, a grid system, and drop-down curtains, Goodling said a $4.5-million upgrade was easily greenlighted by city officials—a signal of the local community's strong support for conventions. Additional phased investments totaling more than $85 million have continued to transform the space into a convention center that gives organizers a chance to offer what Goodling calls a "corporate-level experience on an association budget."
One of those organizations is APS, which hosted the inaugural edition of a new annual experience—the American Physiology Summit—in Long Beach in 2023. Steen said without all the extras that come as a standard package at the center—trussing, rigging, and lighting—the meeting would have been significantly different.
"We probably wouldn't add nearly as much to the parties and other events if we had to pay for it all," Steen said. "You have all of these set pieces there and you just pay labor for them to move it into place. You can basically use anything that's available in the convention center anywhere, which was just such an added benefit."
And it's not just about accommodating a smaller budget. As Steen and his events team considered host destinations for the meeting, what he saw in Long Beach was a wave of innovation rising above a sea of sameness across much of the industry.
"You think of the typical gray box that is a convention center with the [fluorescent] lights and the ugly furniture," Steen said. "That's all over the country. When you walk into the Long Beach Convention Center, it just feels different. There is tons of soft seating and lounge space, and the meeting rooms have wallpaper, sconces, and chandeliers. It's a place you want to be."
That's how much Goodling estimates that most clients would have to pay to rent the 10 trusses—six outside in the plaza and four inside in the convention center—that come as part of the package in Long Beach. "Every dime counts for our clients," he said.
The campus and a Southern California climate make outdoor activations of all kinds possible.
The Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center campus is a production-ready stage, indoors and out.
The facilities that we run are collaboration halls. If we don't give people the chance to sit down, connect, and talk like you do in a living room, we're missing the reason we're in business.Steve Goodling, speaking at the ASM Global Leadership Conference, held in Long Beach in August 2024
As the pace of work continues to accelerate, employers have never been more focused on squeezing value out of every second of an employee's time. Consider UnitedHealth Group, where low keyboard activity can impact compensation and bonus opportunities, or New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which allows employees to work remotely in exchange for giving their boss full-time productivity monitoring.
If so many companies have an always-be-producing obsession, why are some of them prioritizing an environment that includes areas without an obvious objective? Because those areas are where new ideas are waiting to be unleashed.
"Innovation thrives in unproductiveness," Darshan Shah and David Tao wrote in a post on the future of office design, published on architecture and design firm Gensler's website. "By nature of being expansive and explorative, the creative process is most successful when unburdened by the pressure of being measurable. Spaces that allow play with unmeasured outcomes, like maker spaces and creative writing rooms, can greatly support innovation."
Unproductivity can be equally powerful to break up overly packed education programs, creating a blank canvas for attendees to dream up that next big breakthrough concept or bump into that potential new business partner. "In addition to focusing on elevating the science at our meeting, we're dedicated to the softer side of the meeting experience," Steen said. "And the design in Long Beach gives ample space for scientists to connect with each other."
It's not just about the layout inside the convention center, though. At the 2024 edition of the APS gathering, Goodling and his team helped create more space for unfocused energy on the plaza in front of the Terrace Theater that mixed Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatic performances and stilt walkers with carnival games. A DJ and face-painted juggling artists added to the atmosphere that allowed participants to take a distinct break from abstract presentations and educational sessions.
The soft seating areas of the Long Beach Convention Center aren't designed soley for communal gathering. They're also working to meet the needs of today's attendees, the majority of whom must remain connected to their personal and professional lives at all times, whether it's filtering through emails to avoid inbox overload later, texting back the coworker who needs an urgent approval, or calling a spouse to check in on plans for school pick-up the following day. A convention center lobby should mirror a hotel lobby with nooks and crannies that allow for focused work without the need for attendees to return to their rooms.
The ability to be unproductive may sound fun for attendees, but the convention industry still very much relies on measurable outcomes. And in Long Beach, the upgrades have paid off in a big way. For example, the Pacific Ballroom, which had an initial investment of $10 million, has produced $428 million in economic impact, according to an analysis from Cal State Long Beach. And in 2023, visitors to Long Beach collectively generated $1.97 billion in economic impact—a $213-million increase over the pre-pandemic peak, according to research conducted by Kleinhenz Economics. In the coming years, the city is set to welcome an even bigger influx of premier convention business, including groups like the NAACP and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
When attendees aren't out and about in Long Beach spending money to contribute to that value, it's clear that the one-of-a-kind ambience in the convention center is making them happy about their decision to attend. EB—short for Experimental Biology, the name of the meeting before APS completely redesigned the program in 2023—"was getting an overall rating of 3.7, which was pretty hideous in my mind," Steen said. "The first two years we had the Summit in Long Beach, our ratings improved to a 4.4 and a 4.5. The jump in people's perceptions of the meeting was remarkable."
In Long Beach, city leaders are committed to continuing to elevate that perception with new and continued investment in the facility. "We want to keep building and refining the most unique convention center you'll see," Goodling said. "We're focused on helping every client create the connections their audiences crave."
DAVID MCMILLIN is a former Convene editor and freelance writer.
