Staff of the new Anvil Centre is entering the final lap before the conference and events facility opens this fall.
The centre, which will likely have a soft opening sometime this summer, is the final stage of construction and it already has events booked into 2016. At a presentation hosted by Arts Council of New Westminster at Centennial Lodge last week, Anvil manager Vali Marling discussed the progress she and her staff have made thus far.
“We’re probably what I would call full for the fall show season, so from September to December. We absolutely have days that we don’t have any events in the building but I’m thrilled with the number of events we have,” she said. “We’re quite well booked in the spring show season, which is January to June.”
Marling said the design and appearance of the Anvil Centre has played an important role in drawing conferences and events to the city.
Compared to Vancouver’s conference and events centre on Canada Place, New West’s centre is small and caters to a very specific clientele, she said.
“We’re not after that market,” Marling said about the large-scale events typically hosted at the Vancouver conference centre. “We’re after a very unique market.”
That market being a boutique market that maxes out at about 500 people. Thanks to the centre’s adaptable spaces, each conference room within the centre can be changed to fit the specific size of any event. The main floor conference space, for example, can either host two separate conferences or one large event by removing the dividing wall.
Touted as the centre of Metro Vancouver, Marling and her staff are counting on the facility’s design appeal to draw in events throughout the fall and spring show seasons.
“People will travel if there’s value in the centre,” she told the crowd last week.
And value comes from the staff, from the design of the building itself, and from the amenities it can provide, Marling added.
“The building needs to be unique, it needs to be different, needs to be special. It’s definitely a spectacular venue from the design perspective. That attracts people to the venue – then you have to provide the service,” she said. “So if you can’t get your ducks in a row on that front, then they won’t come back.”
Marling is also looking to appeal to the wedding industry. With most of 2014 fully booked for conferences and events, she said the next step is to bring in weddings to fill the vacancies typically seen on weekends and throughout the summer.
“Our main focus is the conferences, which is weekdays, (but) we absolutely have no interest in having the building sit empty on the weekends, so we’re looking at all sorts of different markets to fill those days,” she said.
While none are officially confirmed yet, Marling said the centre already has about four weddings in the works for next year, and staff would begin looking for civic and cultural events to fill other empty dates throughout the year.
“From the conference perspective, there’s not a lot of conferences or meetings that take place over the summer, so that’s when we start working with the civic events, the culture events and bringing in those types of events,” she said.
Next up for the Anvil Centre will be the announcement of the facility’s restaurant, which Marling expects to make sometime in the next two weeks.
While she wouldn’t give any hints as to what type of restaurant it would be, she did express her excitement about its opening and hopes it will help draw people to downtown New Westminster.
“We’re thrilled to pieces with how the restaurant is going to look,” she said. “It will be open to the public. We really want it to draw people down to that area.”
