Meetings & Sports
‘One CRVA’ Meetings Approach
The CRVA is proud of its inspired employees with wide-ranging expertise who work across nine brands to make Charlotte the most sought-after city in the Southeast. The organization relies on a “One CRVA” approach, which taps shared knowledge and resources to skillfully manage multiple venues and varying types of guest experiences.
The structure of the CRVA is rare in the meetings industry and is one of the organization's strongest attributes. This collective and consistent knowledge in understanding how visitors experience the city in multifaceted ways enhances how meetings and conventions are hosted in Charlotte. Meeting planners have the benefit of working with salespeople, convention center employees and other CRVA touchpoints who all have the same common goal in meeting and surpassing the expectations of the client to deliver memorable customer experiences.
Why Meetings Matter to Charlotte
While meeting attendees may utilize the Charlotte Convention Center or other CRVA venues for their designated purposes, they’re also staying overnight at area hotels, experiencing the city's attractions, dining in restaurants or taking advantage of services ranging from florists to dry cleaners to printers. These visitors are generating millions in direct spending along the way, not to mention the powerful trickle-down effect felt by other industries.
This economic impact advances the entire Charlotte community and further enhances the value of the visitor economy. Without the economic activity that visitor spending creates, Charlotte wouldn’t have been able to create some of its most defining assets – Truist Field, the renovations at Bank of America Stadium, The Westin Charlotte, Charlotte Convention Center, Levine Center for the Arts, NASCAR Hall of Fame and more.
Learn more about the CRVA's impact on the local community
Charlotte: Made for Meetings
As the 15th largest city in the nation, Charlotte is easy to access from most major cities thanks to Charlotte Douglas International, the world's sixth busiest airport. With its compact walkable Uptown area, the Queen City boasts diverse attractions, professional sporting venues and innovative culinary offerings, making it an ideal destination of choice for meeting planners who aim to impress.
New hotels such as the Grand Bohemian and JW Marriott supplement the 5,600 rooms within the bustling Uptown area. And a new $127 million Charlotte Convention Center expansion adds more than 50,000 square feet to the facility, making it even easier to meet with added breakout and pre-function areas.
Sports: Charlotte’s Game Changer
A passion for sports has increasingly set the Charlotte market apart from other destinations. The city’s concentration of professional, amateur and major sporting events keeps the city busy more than 200 days and nights a year, making the Queen City a natural fit to recruit and host sporting events.
The CRVA continues to support the recruitment and hosting of sporting events because they consistently produce sizable economic impact and are a sound return on investment for the Charlotte community. Amateur sports is an economic catalyst for the region and consistently makes up more than half of Visit Charlotte’s annual hotel room night production.
Amateur & Youth Sports
Under the leadership of the CRVA, the community has actively been pursuing the amateur and youth sports market for more than 20 years. The market serves as a hotel room night generator for need or low demand periods (holidays, weekends and summertime) when traditional meetings and convention business aren't taking place. Amateur & youth sports often positively impact neighborhoods beyond Charlotte's Center City as well as limited-service hotels due to the concentration of sports facilities, fields and park space across the region.
Venue Management
The CRVA is proud to manage and operate many of the Queen City’s most treasured City of Charlotte-owned assets.