King Edward

A looong time lurker-  but I'm a Vancouver-based fulltime live-events professional and *this* prompted me to post- please if this is far too ranty, by all means get rid of it, but oof this sort of talk drives me bonkers. 

 

1. Holding events in the US only makes sense for a Canadian company if their merch is already handled in the US- which is why a lot of Canadian content creators partner with US distributing companies to handle their merch.

2. "Don't want to or Can't drive" are two different issues- You have six months to get a passport, considering you can get one in less than 14 days if you pay enough, this isn't a massive financial burden. The cost of attending any convention factors into anyone's desire to attend- the event creator determined Vancouver to be it's home. 

3. Don't kid yourself, Vancouver's Convention Center is consistently ranked as one of the best in the world and is the largest in the pacific northwest- you can fit the entirety of PAX West in both the West and East buildings(minus the Benaroya at this point) and still have four hotels literally across the street with another 100k square feet of event space.  By all rights, PAX West should move to a larger space, but they're not because Seattle is home for PA and have stated that explicitly for years. 

4. Flights to Vancouver/Seattle are pretty comparable- again you have six months to figure it out. 

5. Exhibitors don't care at all if an event is in Canada or not-there are expos in Vancouver every week in nearly every industry. Conventions often switch up locations because they're not tied to a specific area- more to a discipline. Pop-culture conventions like LTX, PAX or SDCC are more tied to specific locations because that's generally the best way of making it work when it comes time for staffing and relying on their network to pull it off. 

Exhibitors care about the venue and if there are hotels nearby. They care about the venue because it informs them what sort of services(freight handling, inhouse AV services, Power, other rentable space) they have access to. That isn't to say that the VCC isn't alone in this, but when the VCC has a massive reputation as being one of the best venues on the continent to handle major events- it makes their lives a lot easier.