May 21--With more than 5,000 hotel rooms, Las Vegas' MGM Grand offers more rooms -- by at least a couple thousand -- than any single convention hotel in the Orlando market. And Sin City's Mandalay Bay boasts more meeting space than the four-biggest convention hotels in Orlando combined.

So it's no surprise that Orlando's hotels are feeling some heat from their Far West rival, which has become the natural home for large events that require a combination of meeting space and many rooms under one roof.

To turn up the heat on Vegas, two of Orlando's biggest convention hotels are teaming up to offer meeting planners the chance to stage such events here in Central Florida.

The Peabody Orlando and Hilton Orlando have launched a marketing initiative called Orlando 3000, a name that refers to the hotels' combined room count of 3,058. The hotels, both adjacent to the Orange County Convention Center on International Drive, hope to do a better job of attracting huge meetings by jointly marketing their combined heft at industry shows and through direct sales.

"It really is designed to look at a new market segment neither of us is able to attract today [on our own], to bring additional business to the destination," said Doug Gehret, general manager of the 1,417-room Hilton Orlando.

The two hotels also rival the room count of a third major player in Orlando's convention industry: hotelier Harris Rosen. Rosen's independent hotel company boasts 3,634 rooms spread through three convention hotels near the county-run convention center.

Peabody and Hilton executives say the walkways that connect them to the county center and each other make them natural partners. Gregg Herning, vice president of sales and marketing for Peabody Hotels Group, noted that his company already partners with Rosen Hotels on certain other ventures.

Together, the Peabody and Hilton have 475,000 square feet of meeting space, more than the giant Orlando World Center Marriott or Rosen's Shingle Creek hotel.

Herning said there are more of these kinds of large meetings out there than one might expect. "It's tough to give you a number, but I've got to tell you, it's a good number," he said. "We're going to start with a 'hit list,' if you would, of a hundred."

Gehret, of the Hilton, said luring even a few of those groups each year would be considered a success.

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