“Our competitors are bigger, and they’re newer,” he said. “We really need to catch up to those guys.”

Moreover, most of them are also planning better, he said, estimating needs five years down the road.

In comparison, he said, three big St. Louis conventions — FIRST Robotics, O’Reilly Automotive, and Joyce Meyer Ministries — are leaving in two years. O’Loughlin calculates his hotels will lose a collective $1 million in business. “I talk to my team about it constantly,” he said.

“This is a huge opportunity for St. Louis,” O’Loughlin said. “Tourism business is big. It helps fill hotels. It helps fill restaurants. It brings energy downtown.”

Kitty Ratcliffe, president of the convention commission, recently took the Post-Dispatch on a tour of the facilities. The annex that connects the convention center to the Dome is low and narrow; conventioneers don’t like it, she said. The Dome itself is too high — it feels like a stadium, not convention space. The ballroom, at under 30,000 square feet, needs to double in size, she said. And the handful of loading docks needs to quadruple.