As I Uber the 10 minutes from the Fort Lauderdale Airport to the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort and Spa to attend the 3rd Retina World Congress, we pass the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward Convention Center before crossing over the Intracoastal Waterway. I fondly reminisced about the 17 years of attending the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) meeting in this convention center. The comfortable location made it a favorite stop on the meeting calendar.

Gazing out over the Atlantic Ocean, I thought back to 2012 when the ARVO board of directors decided to move the meeting from Fort Lauderdale, and I couldn’t help but think, “what a huge mistake.” Like Fonzie’s water ski jump over a confined shark, ARVO went from a laid-back, enjoyable, relaxed event where discussions with fellow researchers occurred in swim trunks and flip flops to a business meeting like any other. It had lost its mojo.

The ARVO leadership tried to spin the move positively. Some of the reasons given included running out of space for the meeting at the convention center, no attached hotel, high cost of hotels in the city, bad wireless internet service, and no accessible coffee (yes, really). Most of us had no idea the move had even been put to a vote by the members.

Fort Lauderdale lost an estimated $13 million when ARVO left in 2013 for Seattle, Orlando, and Denver. I distinctly remember the Seattle meeting, presumably because we had accessible coffee, and it was a jarring change from swim trunks to business suits in the convention center.

If we think about hotel cost as a reason to move a meeting, the average hotel room in Fort Lauderdale costs $175. This is lower than Honolulu ($265), Vancouver ($190), and Baltimore ($180), but more than Seattle ($130), New Orleans ($125), Orlando ($105), and Denver ($140). And in San Francisco, where ARVO was supposed to be last year, the average hotel room costs a whopping $397 a night. The idea of moving the meeting to save money so that junior researchers and lab personnel could attend does not seem to be valid at all.

The 2022 ARVO meeting was held in a very cold Denver, and the poster areas, which were once huge and requiring several sessions, could have been housed in any hotel’s ballroom. Meanwhile, in Fort Lauderdale, the county is pumping almost $1 billion into expanding the convention center. The space will increase to 1.2 million square feet, including 350,000 square feet of contiguous exhibit space, a new 65,000 waterfront ballroom, a new waterfront plaza with 50,000 square feet of flexible group event spaces, and high-speed wireless internet throughout.

A luxury hotel is also now planned at the north end of the Fort Lauderdale convention center. Funded by $280 million in general funds (of which $140 million in federal COVID relief funds were rerouted), and $369 million in bonds, it should be completed by late 2025.

All of this is to say that the reasons to leave Fort Lauderdale are now moot. So, let’s “Make ARVO Great Again” and re-establish ARVO’s identity, forged in Sarasota and Fort Lauderdale, and bring it back to Southern Florida in 2028. It is time to go back to our roots, dust off the flip flops, and find our old swim trunks. RP