Destination Crown Center is the name used to market a package of hotels and exhibit space in downtown Kansas City, Mo. The package includes the 52,000-square-foot Crown Exhibit Hall, which opened in January; the 731-room Hyatt Regency Hotel with the largest ballroom (17,487 square feet) in Kansas City; and the 729-room Westin Crown Center Hotel with the most meeting rooms (31) in the city. All told, the 85-acre Destination Crown Center (www.crowncenter.com) has 1,460 sleeping rooms and 137,703 square feet of meeting and exhibit space, including 53 meeting rooms and the exhibit hall.

For once, the exclusive in-house AV service for both hotels and the exhibit hall is one you might look forward to using. Visual Aids Electronics Corp., based in Gaithersburg, Md., is a national company with experience in networking and webcasting. VAE provided the video and projection package for a NASA webcast of a recent robot-building contest in Richmond, Va. Don Breish, VAE's regional director in Kansas City (his office is at the Hyatt) is the guy to talk to about everything from network drops to re-purposing video. (VAE recently added an off-line digital video editing service.)

The exhibit hall has same-level loading docks, 20-foot ceiling clearance, and its own street-level entrance; it can also be accessed directly from the adjacent Hyatt or by an enclosed walkway called The Link from the Westin Crown Center. Most of the exhibit space and meeting rooms in all three buildings are on the same level. The exhibit hall will handle up to 245 10-by-10-foot booths; power, data, telephone, water, and compressed air facilities are throughout the building.