COMDEX (short for Computer Dealer’s Exhibition) was the brainchild of Sheldon Adelson and partners and took place annually in Las Vegas from 1979-2003, starting at the original MGM Grand (now Bally’s) with 3,904 attendees.
In the late '80s the expo was opened up to the general public, which caused a mushrooming in attendance. It's what made billionaire Adelson's initial fortune. In 1988 the partners purchased the Sands Hotel, which debuted the following year as the Sands Expo Center, the only privately owned convention center in the U.S. "Geek Week," as it was known colloquially, reached a top figure of over 200,000 attendees, which, as you correctly point out, was used by the hotels to justify inflated room rates, not only because of the influx of bodies but because these bodies were known to spend much less money in the casinos than the average Vegas visitor (among the city's businesses, only the gentlemen's-club sector particularly looked forward to COMDEX).
In terms of your query regarding the biggest convention ever held, the answer turned out to be strangely elusive. CeBIT, the German equivalent of COMDEX, is the world's largest computer expo and, at its height, was attracting a mammoth 700,000 visitors. Whether tha's enough to earn it the mantle of largest trade show ever, we're not sure. If anyone else knows, please drop us a line.
By the early 2000s, attendance at COMDEX was starting to wane, due to factors including the escalating costs of attending and increased competition from other tech trade shows, including CES, which this year notched up 120,000 visitors, up 6 percent on last year's number. The 2004 COMDEX show was postponed due to lack of heavyweight participants and it's now been permanently replaced by Interop, which takes place at four different venues throughout the year, including Mumbai, New York, Tokyo, and Las Vegas.
Interestingly, the convention trade sector in Las Vegas has been the first to show signs of economic recovery, with Sheldon Adelson predicting a rapid bounce-back that seems to be materializing: "It’s coming back in force, as each quarter goes by there's more and more demand," the Las Vegas Sands owner said in an interview last December. "There's no question about it" rebounding in 2010 "with even greater recovery in 2011," he said. We noted an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal recently about how hotels are dropping the word "resort" from their names in order to sound less vacation-y and more attractive to the business sector. Loews Lake Las Vegas was among the properties cited in the piece and said the dropping of the R-word* from its name last year had caused an increase in its bottom line and was credited with having landing five major conventions.
In terms of convention-center size, the five largest in the world are all in the U.S., with McCormick Place, Chicago coming out on top, with 2.7 million square feet of convention space, followed by Orange County Convention Center in Orlando (2.1 million), Las Vegas Convention Center (just over 2 million), Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (1.7 million), and Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta (1.4 million).
*Of course, this begs the question: If they remove the word "resort" from their names, will properties also start removing the dreaded "resort fees"? No word on that as yet.
