Fans of the Weather Channel and ESPN find it easy to sit in Norman’s cheering section.
Oklahoma’s third-largest city is known for sports and storm stories, home to the University of Oklahoma and its Sooners and the National Weather Center (NWC).
NWC is a favorite for group tours, with displays sure to mesmerize weather watchers. It also promotes its meeting facilities, from a roomy atrium suited to sitdown dinners at rows of rounds to meetings for 30 in its windowed observatory.
This year, NWC hosted a professional society meeting for the first time when the 2009 American Meteorological Society held a summer meeting there. The college town of 100,000 doesn’t lack for convention and meeting facilities.
The state’ largest hotel, the NCED Center, is located near the OU campus. The hotel and its 20,000-square-foot conference center are the property of the U.S. Postal Service and were once used exclusively for its training programs.
Although the postal service remains the center’s major client, it is also open to the public, and it offers features not found at typical conference hotels, such as a 60,000-square-foot fitness center with a regulation-size gym, an indoor track and an Olympic-size pool.
The city’s meeting space grew by about 80,000 square feet last October, with the opening of the Embassy Suites Norman and Conference Center. The new hotel has 283 guest rooms. One of the complex’s features is a 26,000-square-foot ballroom.
Existing properties are keeping themselves in good order it appears.
A recent poll by the CVB showed that 44 percent of the area’s hotels, bed and breakfast and inns have been renovated in the past 12 months. That includes a recently completed guest room renovation at the NCED Center.
(405) 366-8095
www.visitnorman.com
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