Louis Belasco, CEO, Wildwoods Convention Center

In an interview with Invest:, Louis Belasco, CEO of Wildwoods Convention Center, discussed how the destination has not only returned to pre-COVID activity but pushed into a true year-round events market. Belasco highlighted the strength of youth sports and SMERF business, the opportunities in shoulder seasons, and a deliberate shift toward digital marketing and new visitor demographics. “We’ve started to step up our marketing to individuals to let them know that what looks like a weakness is actually an opportunity — a more affordable way to visit the Wildwoods,” Belasco said.

How would you describe the current events landscape in the region and the convention center’s role in it?
Things have really picked up. About two years ago, we got back to what I’d call normal, meaning pre-COVID numbers. Now we’re not just back — we’re exceeding those numbers.

We’ve seen that across the region, but here in the Wildwoods we’ve really felt it acutely. Our convention business continues to be led by the SMERF (Social, Military, Educational, Religious, and Fraternal) market, with youth sports carrying the heaviest load. We still have some room to improve midweek, but overall I’m very pleased with where we stand.

How are you working to strengthen midweek business and the shoulder seasons?
We’ve started to step up our marketing to individuals to let them know that what looks like a weakness is actually an opportunity — a more affordable way to visit the Wildwoods. There are more rooms available in the middle of the week and more availability during the shoulder seasons. Right now, for example, we’re heavily marketing Christmas and our holiday events.

Our neighbor to the south, Cape May, has done an excellent job for the past decade drawing a large number of visitors during that time. We’ve begun to recognize that people are very willing to come to the Jersey Shore even in the colder months, so we’ve stepped up our events around Christmas. Several new holiday events have come on board in the past two years, and for those that have existed for years, we’re working to grow them into larger, more regional events that attract strong crowds.

How are you adapting to rising demand and shifting visitor demographics?
Last summer we took a big step by recognizing the large Latin market we’re now drawing to our shoreline. We had all of our marketing materials translated into Spanish and made a concerted effort to market to people within our region who are already coming to visit. 

You see the impact in the restaurants first. We’ve seen a number of Mexican and Caribbean restaurants open in the last couple of years. A simple stroll along the boardwalk shows that the demographics coming to the Wildwoods are slightly different than they historically have been.

Recognizing our marketplace and where we need to be really guided some of our decisions this year for the coming 2026 season, including how we market, where we market, and to whom we market.

How did the “Welcome to the Wildwoods” campaign influence your marketing strategy?
We’ve shifted a good bit more of our budget into digital marketing. For me, marketing is about going where your audience is, not trying to have them meet you somewhere else. Through our research, we’ve identified our core target as women between 30 and 50 years old. We saw a large share of that demographic on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms.

How have economic shifts and changing travel behaviors affected booking patterns and demand?
One big change is that everybody has gotten very last minute. We used to have a pretty good sense of what kind of summer we were going to have months in advance. Now, through the booking engine we launched a few years ago, we can see that people are booking much closer to their travel dates, sometimes within the same week. Part of that is the ease of booking — and I’m guilty of it myself. I don’t always know what my plans will be a couple of weeks out, but I can jump onto an app, book what I need, and end up where I want to be at a moment’s notice. 

The positive side is that we never truly shut the door on our customers; we can still find availability and get them in at the last minute. From a planning standpoint, though, it makes for some sleepless nights, especially on the events side where you’re not sure if anyone is going to show up. 

This past year we hosted an air show and sold tickets for it. Two weeks ahead of time, it looked like I was going to have an empty beach. Then, within those final two weeks, it filled up and we sold well over 1,000 tickets. So from a planning perspective it’s frustrating, but from a marketing perspective it’s great because it means the customer is almost never out the door.

How has the convention center’s event mix helped extend your season and increase year-round utilization?
This building is 23 years old, and prior to it existing there really wasn’t much happening in the off-season. I grew up here, and when I was a kid you could essentially roll up the sidewalks after Labor Day and call it a year. We’d have a couple of weekends where people might come down, but that was about it. Now we’ve pushed the calendar all the way through to the first of the year.

For a lifelong resident, it’s just mind-blowing, how far that has moved. On the front end, the season used to start around the second week of June when schools let out. We’ve moved that up to the beginning of May. When someone comes in now with a brand-new event idea, we’re often asking if we’re talking about January through April because a lot of weekends are already spoken for. We’ve encouraged our event promoters to push the calendar where we can, and where we can’t, we’re working to move them into midweek slots. 

The success of our events and conventions has shifted the calendar so much that the periods when we used to be begging people to come down are now full until the event runs its course.

What are your top priorities for the next two to three years?
Exclusively at the convention center, one of our biggest projects is getting a host hotel off the ground. It was originally envisioned when the building was constructed, but it hit numerous delays. It got pretty far along, then some title issues had to be addressed. 

Those have since been resolved, and now we’re seeking to pick the project back up. We’ve had discussions with the governor’s office and other state offices about how we move it forward and begin the process of seeking an RFQ (request for qualifications) for a developer to put a new beachfront hotel right outside the convention center. 

We’re looking for a world-class type of hotel and would love to bring one of the flag hotels to the Wildwoods, which really doesn’t exist in southern Cape May County today. At the same time, we’ve seen other hotels being built in the Wildwoods. Over the past 20 years, we saw about a 50% decrease in hotel rooms, replaced by apartment buildings and townhomes that serve as Airbnbs and other short-term rentals. Those have kept our overall number of available units close to the same, but they’ve changed the mix. Instead of exclusively hotel rooms, visitors now have many different options for where they stay. The construction of new hotels in the past two or three years shows that demand is now outpacing supply. We’re working to get that equilibrium back in balance so we can meet the demands of our customers at a lower rate.