PHILADELPHIA,
June 2, 2021 – The Pennsylvania Convention Center is prepared to fully welcome back conventions, meetings, trade shows, and other events to its facility following the announcement by Mayor James Kenney that the City of Philadelphia will lift all indoor and outdoor capacity limits and other Safer at Home restrictions, with the exception of mask requirements, on Friday, June 11.
“With an eye toward the eventual emergence from the pandemic, the Pennsylvania Convention Center (PCC) has utilized the last 14 months work to lay the ground- work and prepare for the safe re-opening of our facility to customers and event attendees,” said Gregory J. Fox, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority. “The PCC and our facility manager ASM Global have implemented a range of enhanced sanitization and safety protocols and innovative capital improvements focused on the health and welfare of our customers and guests. The convention center serves as a major economic driver for hotels, restaurants, and the overall hospitality industry, so we wanted to take steps that would enable our customers to recognize our commitment to health and safety.”
“Infrastructure improvements at our building such as augmented air handling systems with upgraded filtration, UV handrail sterilization on all escalators, touch- less restroom renovations, and others enable us to meet or exceed current health and safety standards,” said John McNichol, President and CEO of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority. “In addition, our team worked closely with health and safety experts to establish new best practices that enabled our facility to earn the Global Bio-risk Advisory Council (GBAC) STAR Accreditation, which demonstrates that the Center has in place the correct work practices, procedures, and systems needed to prepare, respond, and recover from outbreaks and pandemics.”
“From an operations perspective, we developed a comprehensive facility re-opening plan, based on the principles and protocols of the ASM Global VenueShield program,” said Kelvin Moore, Regional General Manager for ASM Global. “These safety protocols, combined with the infrastructure enhancements, enabled us to host a number of important civic events including mail-in ballot counting operations for the 2020 General Election, a major grand jury seating in conjunction with the First Judicial District, and COVID testing and vaccination efforts.”
The groundwork laid by the PCC and ASM Global, working in partnership with the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau (PHLCVB), enabled the facility to successfully host 21,650 attendees as part of the East Coast Volleyball’s 2021 Northeast Volleyball Qualifier (NEQ) tournament last month. Held over three separate weekends (March 27 – 29; April 2—4; April 9 –11), the event made Philadelphia the first major Northeast city (Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Boston) to host a citywide event at a convention center in over a year. The NEQ also brought some much-needed business to the hospitality industry, generating 11,000 hotel room nights at 27 hotels, an overall economic impact of $14.3 million, and $1.3 million in state and local tax revenue.
For the latest updates on the Pennsylvania Convention Center’s website, https://www.paconvention.com/.
