Wisconsin's Weekend Morning News
WWMN Interview: Rich Kirchen from the Milwaukee Business Journal on the Impact of the RNC 7-21-24
It's time to check in with Rich Curchin from the Milwaukee Business Journal. And Rich, I saw you around the convention grounds here in the last week. Are you as tired as I am? No, I don't think so. But yes, tired. I definitely it was a little slow moving this morning here because we're talking the day after the convention. Well, I do want to ask you about the business aspect because for what? Two years at least we have heard how much money this is going to bring to the city, how great it's going to be for businesses, especially hotels, restaurants, any kind of hospitality. What are you hearing? Well, it was very good for hotels. I will say that I just talked with Tim Sheehy from the Association of Commerce. He said they were 96% occupied. I'm not sure if he's talking about Metro Milwaukee or what area we know there were hotels beyond the immediate Milwaukee area also booked. I was also surprised at the number of guests I talked with who were staying at Airbnb. So there apparently was plenty of that available as well. The part that was uneven was the restaurant and bar scene where we certainly and I'm sure you did as well were seeing and hearing from the owners that some places were slammed, as they say, in the tourism business were very busy. Others saw little or no business or worse business than usual, partly as a result of office workers not being downtown. So you had this dichotomy where you had tens of thousands of people who normally are working downtown, working from home that all week. And then you had the 50,000-ish convention visitors in town. But many of them were just in the convention zone. And that's a good point because as you did, I talked with not just delegates, but I talked with a lot of people who had come to town to work the convention for the RNC and I kept asking them, you know, where have you been? What have you done? And they said, we've been so busy. We haven't gotten off the grounds. We're just here and we grab a burger or whatever we can when we have a chance. And the delegates, and this is the interesting thing. They had so many parties. There was so many hospitality suites and various venues that were hosting them for prayer breakfasts or luncheons or dinners that they weren't going out to restaurants. They had plenty to eat. They had plenty to drink and they were enjoying the free stuff. Right. So if you were a venue or a space that was hosting those events and those parties and so forth, you probably had a great week. I mean, I walked past at least a couple of places on King Drive, just east of high serve forum that, you know, there were security guards outside every day and they had private events going on. So they were booked up the whole time and they probably did fine. I also heard of one of the establishments in the brewery district, the old Paps area where, yeah, they had these huge parties for Axios news and website. But yeah, a lot of that did not go beyond, you know, third ward is certainly one of the places where we heard a lot of businesses that were disappointed. Business did pick up throughout the course of the week. I think the last day or two was better, but it was definitely not spread around as much as they were expecting. Well, in the other part was it was so hard to get in and out of the yellow zone, which is where we work right here at the radio station, and especially that first day, I think many people that might have come downtown otherwise said, I'm not going to go through that mess. Right. Again, you, yes. So not only did you lose the office workers who usually would go for lunch or breakfast and maybe stop for a drink after work, they were gone and then you didn't even have the local residents from the area stopping down to check it out because they were concerned about congestion, streets being closed and so forth. All right. So what does this all mean? Will we get the convention business? Will we get more tourism? Will Milwaukee see more benefit financially from the RNC than some of the businesses might have seen here in the last week? You know, the messaging is that it was a short term boost for those businesses. We've been talking about that were hosting events and and or that were sort of in the walking zone of the convention. But the big picture all along has been to advertise this, use this as an advertisement for Milwaukee as a convention and visitor destination. That remains to be seen now visit Milwaukee says that they're just since Milwaukee won the right to host this convention that their inquiries have gone way up. They've something like doubled their bookings for future conventions. Now there actually is this example of Milwaukee was able to pull it off. So they have something to back that up and they're going to be going out to trade shows in the coming weeks and months and saying, Hey, this was successful. Come on down or come on up to Milwaukee. It's going to play out over a number of years and we will find out if that was the case as you wrap it. What was the best part of the convention as far as you're concerned? The weather, it was beautiful summer weather. The first day was sort of hot for for us. You had the good news is you were only steps away from stepping into the air condition comfort of the Baird Center, the Panther Arena or Pfizer forum. But the other days it was Wednesday and Thursday were beautiful. Yeah, I mean, that's a selling point certainly during the summer compared to having a convention in South Florida or Phoenix or Las Vegas. Rich Kirchard from the Milwaukee Business Journal. Great to have you here today.