Popular Corvette show leaving St. Charles

When you have a car that you've put a lot of money and care into, you don't want to drive it in congested traffic or on less than perfect roads.

More than anything else, that's why one of the largest Corvette shows in the area will leave St. Charles in 2013.

Bloomington Gold is the longest-running Corvette show in the country. It draws about 3,000 hotel room bookings during the three to four day period the show comes to St. Charles every year during the third week of June. The show came to St. Charles in 2002.

Bloomington Gold officials notified city staffers Wednesday that the 2012 show will be the final time St. Charles benefits from all those tourists. Ed Saari said the decision was not based on any sort of mistreatment from St. Charles or Pheasant Run Resort, which hosts the show. Rather, the event saw somewhat of a downturn in participants this year with many of the attendees expressing frustration with the route they had to take to get to St. Charles.

After pulling a healthy number of attendees from the Chicago area, most of the new growth from the show was coming from western Indiana.

“We're finding more and more that people don't want to drive into the Chicago area with their Corvettes through that Gary bottleneck, Saari said. “We hate to leave St. Charles, but the drive there is just not conducive to a driving event. We just needed to do this to keep our business going.”

Bloomington Gold will relocate to Champaign in 2013 on the belief that it is an easier destination from Indiana, yet not so far that Chicago area participants won't come to the show.

Amy Egolf from the St. Charles Convention and Visitors Bureau said the loss of the show won't be felt as much by local hotels as it will be by local restaurants. June already is a pretty busy month for St. Charles hotels, she said.

Egolf said Carol Stream, Elgin and Aurora hotels also were typical destinations for guests of the car show. And with 18 months of advance notice that the car show is leaving, Egolf believes both the hotels and Pheasant Run will be able to create new bookings for the hotel rooms that Bloomington Gold guests normally would fill.

Pheasant Run shuts down the golf course to accommodate the Corvettes during the car show.

Egolf said the resort will now be able to keep make up for some of the loss in visitors with increased golf course revenue. Local restaurants won't have that kind of a safety valve.

“There's a lot of Corvette club members who come to town and visit restaurants during the three or four days of the show,” Egolf said. “There will probably be a bigger impact from the loss felt by those restaurants. But the difference between Champaign and St. Charles is really almost apples and oranges. I'm not closing any doors that they might want to come back to us at some point.”

The final year of the Bloomington Gold Show in St. Charles will run from June 21 to June 23.