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Cabanas, chandeliers, and splashes of neon create hotel-like social spaces at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center.
A decade ago, when he began hanging chandeliers in the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center and adding the kind of seating and artwork that wouldn’t seem out of place in a high-end hotel lobby, “everyone thought I was crazy,” said Steve Goodling, president & CEO at Meet Long Beach. But Goodling, who had previously worked for Shangri La Hotels, had observed how people were drawn to the warm, inviting spaces in hotel lobbies as places to connect with one another, or to answer emails in a quiet corner — things that meetings participants also want to do.
The world is now catching up with Goodling — the “hotelification” of commercial spaces, including office buildings and airports, is part of a growing trend that is transforming spaces in all real estate sectors, Amy Campbell, an architect and senior associate at Gensler in San Francisco, told The New York Times earlier this year. Campbell described “the hospitality experience” as “anticipating the needs of others and then creating accommodations for that.” That proactive attitude toward hospitality also is present at Long Beach — in addition to furnishing the convention center with welcoming spaces, Goodling and his team also make furniture, lighting, and props available to meeting organizers to create emotionally resonant experiences for participants.
Meeting spaces that tap into emotions was identified as a trend in Amex GBT’s 2025 Meetings and Events Forecast. “When we looked for venues in the past, we looked at location, price, and value,” said Emma Bason, Amex GBT Meetings & Events’ director global venue sourcing. “Now we are asking, ‘How does this venue make you feel?’”
The “hotelification” of event venues and other commercial spaces, including office buildings and airports, is part of a growing trend that is transforming spaces in all real estate sectors.
Goodling understood long before others in the industry the value of creating more intimate spaces for meeting participants in convention centers, said Dan Hoffend, executive vice president of convention centers at ASM Global, which manages 90 convention centers, including in Long Beach. “We wanted do more corral-type environments, big meeting areas, big banquet areas, while hotels were a lot more intimate,” he said.
In August, ASM Global chose Long Beach for its annual Leadership Summit, so that the leaders of other properties could experience how easy the center made it for participants to find a cozy place to sit down and connect with one another between sessions, Hoffend said.
The movement toward more intentional and intimate physical spaces is expected to grow, reported market intelligence agency Mintel in its 2025 Global Consumer Trends report, including as a counterweight against digital spaces. When he spoke to Convene, Hoffend gave an example of how the kinds of spaces at the Long Beach convention center can moderate technology’s isolating tendencies. “Having your phone can keep you feeling busy, even though you might just be bored and browsing — and you can easily hide” behind it, he said. “If you have environments where it’s an open and welcoming scenario, with coffee shops and little zones or areas where you may be doing some work, but you’re also engaged, you feel like you’re part of that community. It brings the spontaneity back.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor of Convene.
Emotional Engagement
- How Events Can Foster Emotional Engagement
- At Conferences, We Trust: How Shared Experiences Break Down Cynicism
- An Event Entrepreneur’s Quest to Redefine Belonging
- 5 Ways Meetings Fuel Belonging
- How to Make Belonging the Centerpiece of Your Events
- Social Connection: There’s an App for That
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