A few years ago, all that anyone heard about Detroit was about its dying auto industry, looming bankruptcy, and those TV news aerial shots of whole blocks of abandoned homes -- so many that the city was talking about how best to raze thousands of them.
Then, however, something happened. Detroit refused to give up. The auto industry's Big Three began to revive, making cars that people wanted to drive. News stories began to crop up about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, moving his company offices into downtown Detroit and encouraging start-ups and young companies to follow. Despite a drawn-out and contentious bankruptcy, the city kept investing in itself. An award-winning rebranding campaign, "America's Comeback City," helped change the tone and tenor of national news coverage. In January, CNN Money called Detroit "The New Brooklyn," and in May, USA Today named its Midtown neighborhood one of "10 Up-and-Coming Neighborhoods Around the USA." A revitalization campaign began transforming the five-and-a-half mile RiverFront area, making it a place people wanted to be. A $279-million plan to restore the Cobo Center, the city's 2.4-million-square-foot downtown convention center located on the banks of the Detroit River, started attracting attention. As a result, convention bookings are up 145 percent so far this year, after rising 208 percent in 2013.
Nor is Detroit alone. Oakland, CA, is turning itself from a crime-ridden city happily separated from San Francisco by a bridge into a growing outpost for start-up tech firms fleeing the rising rents of Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
A pair of cities further along in the process of reinventing themselves are Cleveland and Nashville, says Felicia Brent, vice president of strategic sourcing for Experient, a Maritz Travel Company. Calling them "frontrunners" in the up-and-coming cities category, Brent notes that Cleveland recently completed a major renovation to its convention center and Nashville just finished a new one.
"Both Cleveland and Nashville boast vibrant entertainment districts unique to their cities, offering live music, unique and local restaurants, entertainment, arts, culture, and sports. It gives meeting attendees an opportunity to experience the flair of each city and all within walking distance of the core hotel package in the downtown areas," she says. "Both cities offer great value in terms of affordability, access into the city from the airport, and great hotel packages."
What all these cities have in common with top meetings venues such as Las Vegas, Orlando, and now Chicago -- which just this year finally beat out those perennial contenders to secure the top spot on Cvent's list of top event destinations -- is that they are investing in the meetings and convention market.
"It's a theme across the last several years that when destinations invest in new hotels, convention centers, attractions, or transportation/infrastructure improvements, it does have a big impact on whether planners want to go to that destination," says Eric Eden, vice president of marketing for Cvent.
But there's more to it than just the infrastructure, he adds. There are "some destinations planners are aware of, like Vegas and Orlando," Eden says. "But it's one thing to say somewhere is a good tourist destination, but people are not always aware of things like whether there is a good convention center there, or if they have new hotels or attractions for attendees at conferences. Marketing is necessary."
Here's a look at three cities that are making a move: Detroit, which is building on a grassroots revitalization effort; Oakland, which is leveraging its location and growing gentrification to pursue the tech industry; and Chicago, an always-popular destination that climbed back to the top thanks to an administration dedicated to the meetings and conventions industry's needs.
Detroit: Building on Hometown Passion
When the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau asked the planners of PLM World -- a 2,000-person annual convention organized by an independent nonprofit association that calls itself "the Voice of the User" of Siemens' hugely popular Product Lifecycle Management software -- to hold the show in Detroit, they were, to say the least, skeptical.
Detroit-based auto manufacturers and supplier companies use the software and make up the biggest concentration of PLM World's members. Despite this, in the past 15 years the association had not brought -- or even considered bringing -- its annual convention to Motor City. Long seen as the poster child for the decline of the American Rust Belt, Detroit only emerged from a long and highly publicized bankruptcy last month.
"The Detroit CVB begged us to come on a site visit, and at first, we put them off," says Beth Ewing, business director of PLM World. "We have a site selection committee on our board of directors and we all looked at each other and said, 'Are you out of your mind? Why would we want to go to Detroit?' We have a member who works in that area, and he wasn't even excited about it."
Eventually, however, the Detroit CVB's persistence paid off, and Ewing and three site-selection committee members gave in. "We were all in shock, including the gentleman who lives nearby and works in the auto industry," says Ewing. "People don't understand that Downtown Detroit, where the convention center is located, is not the area you think of when you think of the trouble with Detroit."
Overcoming that perception is a challenge that the CVB has been working on for several years, and with some success. Its award-winning rebranding campaign, "America's Comeback City," has helped change the tone and tenor of news coverage, says Bill Bodhe, senior vice president of sales and marketing of the Detroit CVB. "We made a significant push to show the media that Detroit is not just blight," he says. "We had to show them the rebirth of Downtown and Midtown."
Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert may have the highest profile of Detroit's backers, spending $1.3 billion on downtown commercial property and moving his own 12,000 employees there, but he was not alone in this fight. Detroit recently broke ground on a $140-million, 3.3-mile streetcar system partially funded by private businesses and philanthropic organizations. A "grand bargain" raised more than $800 million to save the collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts from being auctioned off.
And, of course, there's the $279-million renovation of its convention facility, the Cobo Center. "That has brought a lot of credibility and excitement to the convention marketplace," Bodhe says. "We have adjusted work rules and put new management in place. It is a great experience."
No matter how impressive the infrastructure was to Ewing and her colleagues, it was the CVB itself that put Detroit over the top, she says. "I went and I saw Detroit, and it is great, but if I can't sell it to my members, it's not going to work," Ewing notes. "It comes down to them wanting to be here."
The CVB gave her group a great presentation about the city, Ewing says. "But it was also about how they want to help us market their city," she adds. "More than any other city I've been to, I feel that now they are a team member. It is much more of a partnership than any other city I've worked with."
Oakland: Pursuing the Tech Market
Oakland didn't fall as far as Detroit, but until a few years ago it was still known mainly as a poor, violent city across the Bay from trendy, hip San Francisco and less than an hour from San Jose and Silicon Valley.
But it has a lot going for it, from its location near the heart of the California tech industry to good transportation infrastructure. The city has also beginning to be subject to gentrification and the accompanying nightlife and dining scene it brings, which is attractive to attendees. Seventy-five restaurants opened in 2013 alone, including several by Michelin-starred chefs.
By 2012, Oakland had been named "One of America's Coolest Cities" by Forbes and placed fifth on a list of "45 Places To Go in 2012" by the New York Times, between London and Tokyo.
One of the event planners taking notice was Bambi Francisco, CEO of Alameda, CA-based Vator, a company launched in 2007 with the goal of connecting tech entrepreneurs with investors and venture capitalist firms (VCs). Its signature event is called Vator Splash, and it combines education and networking opportunities with head-to-head competitions in which 10 start-ups present five-minute pitches before an audience of VCs and fellow entrepreneurs who vote on three finalists and, after another round of rapid-fire presentations, determine a winner.
"We had been in San Francisco for years, and it was getting crowded," Francisco says. "We try to find places that are overlooked as locations for our events. There are still some sketchy parts around town, but there are a growing number of start-ups and investors in the area that need help getting the word out. We are looking through the lens of opportunity, for places with room to grow."
While she looked at Detroit and St. Louis, "the challenge was that they did not have proximity to San Francisco and Silicon Valley," she says, adding that that traveling to the Bay Area is art of the business. "When we put out the call for start-ups, we know they will come," she adds.
She found Oakland's waterfront neighborhood of Jack London Square to be trendy, beautiful, and safe, so Vator took over two floors of an empty building and outfitted it for Vator Splash Oakland this past May. She is looking at existing venues for Vator Splash Oakland 2015. The 2014 event registered about 1,000 people, 40 percent of them from Oakland, even though just 3 percent of the Bay Area's VC dollars go to Oakland, compared with 60 percent to San Francisco.
The 64,000-square-foot Oakland Convention Center and attached Oakland Marriott City Center have undergone renovations -- $8 million and $17 million, respectively, in the past two years -- and are surrounded by two trendy neighborhoods, Old Oakland and Uptown. From there, it's an easy walk to other downtown neighborhoods, including Jack London Square. Transportation is also a strength, with easy access to major highways, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) subway system, ferries, and by the end of the year, a tram directly connecting Oakland's airport with BART.
Despite the growing number of tech companies attracted by the city's low rents and a burgeoning population of tech workers, Oakland also has a perception problem.
"Oakland has experienced a lot of change in the past year," says Alison Best, Visit Oakland's president and CEO. "We have new restaurants and shops in every neighborhood, and we have new live music venues, new activities like Segway Tours, and new off-site venues that offer unique teambuilding activities. The new branding includes a MICE message -- with the tagline 'Movers and Shakers' -- showing how you can go from a beautiful board room where big decisions are made to a waterfront bar for cold shaken martinis and post-meeting fun."
Chicago: Fighting for Meetings
Chicago didn't have very far to go to reach the pinnacle of Cvent's list of the Top 50 Meeting Destinations in the U.S., but the city's reputation as a meetings and conventions locale definitely had some rough edges up until a few years ago, most notably involving problems with the 2.6-million-square-foot McCormick Place convention center's work rules, accessibility, and paucity of on-site hotel rooms.
Chicago had few weaknesses other than that. It's a beautiful city with world-class entertainment, dining, and cultural institutions, to say nothing of the fantastic Lake Michigan waterfront and a business base that includes the headquarters of 31 of Fortune 500 companies.
One of Chicago's biggest strengths for meetings is its central location in the U.S., says Cvent's Eden. "People really like that," he notes. "If you're on one side of the country or the other you'll pull fewer attendees."
Even so, the fact that Chicago topped the list "surprised a lot of people," says Eden. One factor was three recent big hotel investments: The Langham, Chicago, a new $250-million, 316-room property in the former IBM Building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the $168-million renovation of the Hyatt Regency Chicago on Lower Wacker Drive; and the $110-million renovation and expansion of the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, the convention center's headquarters hotel, which recently opened a new 600-room tower. That's not to mention the new $140-million, 10,000-seat arena planned for McCormick's grounds, or its new 1,200-room Marriott Marquis, for which ground was broken this fall.
"The biggest change has got to be what has occurred at McCormick Place in terms of exhibitor rights and labor reforms," says Donald Welsh, president and CEO of Choose Chicago, the city's destination marketing organization. "They were customer driven. Five or six years ago a large group of our main customers said, 'You either change and be more competitive, or we have to leave.'"
Welsh credits both labor leaders and Mayor Rahm Emanuel for working together to pass the reforms. One of the mayor's earliest actions upon taking office in 2011 was to wage a hard-fought and very public battle for these reforms. It not only showed that Chicago was serious about attracting the meetings and conventions business, but also publicized the reforms far more effectively than an advertising campaign could have done. The agreement "allowed us to retain a lot of those shows for multiple years," Welsh says.
Those changes allowed Chicago to look beyond its bread and butter: the association market. "We were myopically focused on the association market," he says. "The reforms and the exhibitor rights allowed us to go after the corporate market, the third-party intermediary market, and the for-profit trade shows to an extent that we haven't done before, and that has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in new business."
Welsh points to a new Microsoft convention that will bring more than 20,000 attendees to McCormick Place in 2015. Welsh adds, "That, to me, is probably the biggest example of what these labor reforms have meant."
Questions or comments? Email [email protected]
This article appears in the December 2014 issue of Successful Meetings.
Puerto Vallarta Creates a CVB
In 2014, five years after the construction of the Puerto Vallarta International Convention Center, the city on Mexico's Pacific coast took another step in its pursuit of international meetings and conventions by launching a separate convention and visitors bureau (CVB) to augment the Puerto Vallarta Tourism Board.
A 100-year-old beach city that attracted leisure tourism on its own, unlike the carefully planned resort zones in Cancun and Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta has seen a growing number of visitors, with international arrivals up 6 percent in the first nine months of the year, compared with the same time period in 2013.
This year, the CVB attended the IMEX America trade show in Las Vegas and has worked with meetings industry associations such as Meeting Professionals International (MPI), the International Congress & Convention Association (ICCA), Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), and the Society of Incentive Travel Excellence (SITE), in order to pursue MICE business and to encourage its members to obtain certifications from those organizations.
"We want to certify that Puerto Vallarta's meeting planning industry is at an international level and can conduct business at that level," says Gustavo Rivas-Solis, a spokesperson for the CVB. "Puerto Vallarta can compete not only with other Mexican destinations but across the globe."
As the second-largest Mexican beach destination for travelers from the U.S. and Canada, Puerto Vallarta now wants to leverage that recognition into a share of the meetings and conventions market, too. "We want them all because we can -- and have -- handled them all," Rivas-Solis adds. "We have the infrastructure to provide the service needed."
Aside from the convention center, which has 55,000 square feet of indoor meeting space and 247,500 square feet outdoors on a plaza in front of the convention center, the destination has 20 resorts with substantial meetings facilities.
Another element in Puerto Vallarta's plans is the $75 million being invested in the area's roads through 2018 by Mexico's National Infrastructure Program, Rivas-Solis says. Aside from improvements, it will help the destination connect existing roads more efficiently, he adds.
Oakland: Pursuing the Tech Market
Oakland didn't fall as far as Detroit, but until a few years ago it was still known mainly as a poor, violent city across the Bay from trendy, hip San Francisco and less than an hour from San Jose and Silicon Valley.
But it has a lot going for it, from its location near the heart of the California tech industry to good transportation infrastructure. The city has also beginning to be subject to gentrification and the accompanying nightlife and dining scene it brings, which is attractive to attendees. Seventy-five restaurants opened in 2013 alone, including several by Michelin-starred chefs.
By 2012, Oakland had been named "One of America's Coolest Cities" by Forbes and placed fifth on a list of "45 Places To Go in 2012" by the New York Times, between London and Tokyo.
One of the event planners taking notice was Bambi Francisco, CEO of Alameda, CA-based Vator, a company launched in 2007 with the goal of connecting tech entrepreneurs with investors and venture capitalist firms (VCs). Its signature event is called Vator Splash, and it combines education and networking opportunities with head-to-head competitions in which 10 start-ups present five-minute pitches before an audience of VCs and fellow entrepreneurs who vote on three finalists and, after another round of rapid-fire presentations, determine a winner.
"We had been in San Francisco for years, and it was getting crowded," Francisco says. "We try to find places that are overlooked as locations for our events. There are still some sketchy parts around town, but there are a growing number of start-ups and investors in the area that need help getting the word out. We are looking through the lens of opportunity, for places with room to grow."
While she looked at Detroit and St. Louis, "the challenge was that they did not have proximity to San Francisco and Silicon Valley," she says, adding that that traveling to the Bay Area is art of the business. "When we put out the call for start-ups, we know they will come," she adds.
She found Oakland's waterfront neighborhood of Jack London Square to be trendy, beautiful, and safe, so Vator took over two floors of an empty building and outfitted it for Vator Splash Oakland this past May. She is looking at existing venues for Vator Splash Oakland 2015. The 2014 event registered about 1,000 people, 40 percent of them from Oakland, even though just 3 percent of the Bay Area's VC dollars go to Oakland, compared with 60 percent to San Francisco.
The 64,000-square-foot Oakland Convention Center and attached Oakland Marriott City Center have undergone renovations -- $8 million and $17 million, respectively, in the past two years -- and are surrounded by two trendy neighborhoods, Old Oakland and Uptown. From there, it's an easy walk to other downtown neighborhoods, including Jack London Square. Transportation is also a strength, with easy access to major highways, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) subway system, ferries, and by the end of the year, a tram directly connecting Oakland's airport with BART.
Despite the growing number of tech companies attracted by the city's low rents and a burgeoning population of tech workers, Oakland also has a perception problem.
"Oakland has experienced a lot of change in the past year," says Alison Best, Visit Oakland's president and CEO. "We have new restaurants and shops in every neighborhood, and we have new live music venues, new activities like Segway Tours, and new off-site venues that offer unique teambuilding activities. The new branding includes a MICE message -- with the tagline 'Movers and Shakers' -- showing how you can go from a beautiful board room where big decisions are made to a waterfront bar for cold shaken martinis and post-meeting fun."
Chicago: Fighting for Meetings
Chicago didn't have very far to go to reach the pinnacle of Cvent's list of the Top 50 Meeting Destinations in the U.S., but the city's reputation as a meetings and conventions locale definitely had some rough edges up until a few years ago, most notably involving problems with the 2.6-million-square-foot McCormick Place convention center's work rules, accessibility, and paucity of on-site hotel rooms.
Chicago had few weaknesses other than that. It's a beautiful city with world-class entertainment, dining, and cultural institutions, to say nothing of the fantastic Lake Michigan waterfront and a business base that includes the headquarters of 31 of Fortune 500 companies.
One of Chicago's biggest strengths for meetings is its central location in the U.S., says Cvent's Eden. "People really like that," he notes. "If you're on one side of the country or the other you'll pull fewer attendees."
Even so, the fact that Chicago topped the list "surprised a lot of people," says Eden. One factor was three recent big hotel investments: The Langham, Chicago, a new $250-million, 316-room property in the former IBM Building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the $168-million renovation of the Hyatt Regency Chicago on Lower Wacker Drive; and the $110-million renovation and expansion of the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, the convention center's headquarters hotel, which recently opened a new 600-room tower. That's not to mention the new $140-million, 10,000-seat arena planned for McCormick's grounds, or its new 1,200-room Marriott Marquis, for which ground was broken this fall.
"The biggest change has got to be what has occurred at McCormick Place in terms of exhibitor rights and labor reforms," says Donald Welsh, president and CEO of Choose Chicago, the city's destination marketing organization. "They were customer driven. Five or six years ago a large group of our main customers said, 'You either change and be more competitive, or we have to leave.'"
Welsh credits both labor leaders and Mayor Rahm Emanuel for working together to pass the reforms. One of the mayor's earliest actions upon taking office in 2011 was to wage a hard-fought and very public battle for these reforms. It not only showed that Chicago was serious about attracting the meetings and conventions business, but also publicized the reforms far more effectively than an advertising campaign could have done. The agreement "allowed us to retain a lot of those shows for multiple years," Welsh says.
Those changes allowed Chicago to look beyond its bread and butter: the association market. "We were myopically focused on the association market," he says. "The reforms and the exhibitor rights allowed us to go after the corporate market, the third-party intermediary market, and the for-profit trade shows to an extent that we haven't done before, and that has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in new business."
Welsh points to a new Microsoft convention that will bring more than 20,000 attendees to McCormick Place in 2015. Welsh adds, "That, to me, is probably the biggest example of what these labor reforms have meant."
Questions or comments? Email [email protected]
This article appears in the December 2014 issue of Successful Meetings.