MAPP holds its 2026 Benchmarking and Best Practices Conference from Tuesday 29 September to Thursday 1 October. The venue publisher lists the event at the Indiana Convention Center, Wabash Ballroom 1-3, and forecasts 650 attendees. Plastics Business, the association's trade publication, places the conference and its secured room block at the Indianapolis Downtown Marriott, 350 W. Maryland. The two pages disagree on the meeting address; the room block sits at the Marriott on the trade publication's account.
The Marriott carries 650 rooms and 42,000 square feet of meeting space on Visit Indy's connected-hotel list. One contract signs the room block, the meeting space, the food and beverage and the reception together, and the 650-person forecast fills that house.
Downtown Indianapolis holds 7,100 hotel rooms, and 4,700 of them connect to the Convention Center by skywalk. The forecast equals 9.15 percent of downtown stock. The city absorbs that demand inside its existing inventory, and the host property carries the block.
The downtown room set that can hold a 650-person programme
Visit Indy publishes a sleeping-room count and a meeting-square-footage figure for each property in its connected-hotel package. Seven of them carry both a room count and at least 20,000 square feet.
- JW Marriott Indianapolis — 1,005 rooms and 104,482 square feet, the anchor of Marriott IndyPlace, which holds five interconnected Marriott-brand hotels and 2,276 rooms.
- Signia by Hilton Indianapolis — 803 rooms and 235,000 square feet, including a 50,000-square-foot ballroom, opening with the Convention Center expansion.
- Indianapolis Marriott Downtown — 650 rooms and 42,000 square feet, the property that holds the block.
- The Westin Indianapolis — 575 rooms and 42,500 square feet.
- Hyatt Regency Indianapolis — 499 rooms and 35,000 square feet.
- Crowne Plaza Indianapolis Downtown Union Station — 273 rooms and 52,107 square feet, including 26 Pullman traincar sleepers on the original tracks.
- Embassy Suites Indianapolis Downtown — 360 rooms and 24,200 square feet.
The Conrad Indianapolis publishes 247 rooms and 15,000 square feet. Le Méridien Indianapolis publishes 100 rooms and 2,668 square feet. The combined Courtyard, SpringHill Suites and Fairfield Inn & Suites block publishes 621 rooms.
The show week that closes the day before
The Do it Best Corp. Fall Market closes out of the Indiana Convention Center on Monday 28 September, the day before the conference opens. The venue forecasts 12,000 for that show. The organiser counts 1,200-plus vendors, 9,300-plus attendees and 566,000-plus square feet of market floor, and its housing system lists 22 hotels with a distance band for each.
Do it Best's 9,300 attendees against 7,100 downtown rooms is 1.31 attendees for every room. That show presses 22 properties across four days. The conference presses one address across three.
What the benchmark buyer signs
MAPP publishes tiered registration on the trade publication's page: $1,038 for members, $1,264 for non-members, $950 for a group of four or more and $76 for the Lunch and Learn add-on. Room rates sit behind the association's own booking link and stay unpublished.
A property that wins a 650-person benchmark contract holds a full house, a full ballroom and a full food and beverage line for a weekday window. The premium that contract carries answers to the supply arriving inside the same twelve months.
What the new supply does to that premium
Newmark's 4Q 2025 Indianapolis report lists Signia by Hilton Indianapolis at 814 rooms for Q4 2026, with Kite Realty Group Trust as developer. The venue publisher states 803 rooms. Newmark also lists the Motto by Hilton Indianapolis Downtown at 116 rooms under The Gettys Group, the Ritz-Carlton Downtown at 170 rooms for Q1 2028 under Boxcar Development LLC, and the 170-room InterContinental Indianapolis that opened in February 2025 under Keystone Group.
Eight hundred and three rooms into 7,100 downtown rooms comes to 11.3 percent more inventory. Newmark puts the metro's year-to-date RevPAR change at minus 4.8 percent, against minus 0.7 percent for the Midwest and minus 1.2 percent for the top 104 U.S. markets, on Kalibri Labs data. Its RevPAR performance index reads 0.914, second of 16 Midwest markets.