Major customer returns to Pennsylvania Convention Center

by Jane M. Von Bergen

STAFF WRITER  @JaneVonBergen |  jvonbergen@phillynews.com

The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, joining with the American Society of Ophthalmic Administrators, has booked its 2022 annual symposium and Congress at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 20 years after the Cataract group vowed it would never hold another meeting at the center.

"In my over 25 years of involvement in producing meetings from New York to Anaheim to San Francisco and Chicago, I have never been confronted with such a negative labor situation as was experienced in your city," David A. Karcher, executive director of the group, said in a Philadelphia Inquirer interview shortly after the group's last meeting here in 2002. The society canceled its 2008 and 2012 Philadelphia conventions.

To the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, which booked the group, the Society's return indicates that word is beginning to spread that the center's labor and management issues are behind it. The Society's convention is one of the largest, expected to draw 13,000 visitors who will spend 37,359 nights in hotel rooms and generate a projected $40 million in economic impact.