Ask Karen Sabo why she doesn't use CVBs when planning her meetings, and she'll tell you about the topless-club incident.
Last year, Sabo, a planner with Plaza Travel in Dallas, was working on a series of high-level physicians' meetings in first-tier cities across the country. With only 72 hours to plan the first get-together, she sent an online RFP to the city's CVB—and started getting inundated with e-mails from properties that didn't match her specifications at all. That was bad enough—until she got one offering her group free tickets to a strip club. "This is a conservative group of neurosurgeons," says Sabo. "If I'd passed that e-mail on to the client, I would have been in the doghouse. It would have been a deal killer."
Furious that the bureau had ignored her specs and passed on her information to all its members indiscriminately, Sabo decided to do her own research online and contact properties directly. "After that fiasco, I did all seven meetings without speaking to anyone from a CVB," she notes.
Sabo's hardly alone. According to Successful Meetings' State of the Industry report, between late 2002 and late 2004, the percentage of planners who submit requests for proposal directly to meeting venues via the Web increased by over three-quarters, to 48.7 percent total. Add to that the growth of site-selection companies like giant HelmsBriscoe that do the jobs bureaus often handle, and it's clear that the service niche that CVBs traditionally occupied is under attack.
"The marketplace is changing, and bureaus need to be aware of what's going on," says Reint Reinders, president and CEO of the San Diego CVB. "With the new technology available, bureaus need to make sure their own technological offerings are about doing things differently and more rapidly. The core of it is listening to your customers."
Fortunately, some CVBs are doing just that. Faced with these developments in the marketplace, bureaus are seeking new ways to prove their worth to meeting planners. We spoke with CVB heads nationwide to learn some ways they're rising to meet these challenges, then talked to planners about what they think of the latest innovations.
Fire with Fire
William J. Myers is one meeting professional who doesn't mince words about technology's effect on CVBs. "Bureaus are being disenfranchised by hotel chains, technology, and the Internet," declares the past president of Chicago-based Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) and longtime executive at the American Academy of Family Physicians, where he spent most of his 25 years as convention manager. Nowadays, as president of a meetings software firm in Overland Park, KS, Myers spends his time re-enfranchising bureaus via his latest invention: E-Autofeedback, an online post-event survey designed for CVBs and now used by 30 bureaus nationwide, from Atlanta to San Diego.
"Bureaus are good at selling and servicing the business while it's in town, but not at garnering feedback from customers," explains Myers. Besides being faster, easier, and more efficient than telephone or paper surveys, E-Autofeedback also increases the survey reply rate by sending out e-mail reminders to potential respondents, and includes a section on future needs. "Bureaus don't always think to ask their customers if they're coming back," says Myers, "but we're finding that when we ask consistently, 15 to 20 percent of respondents have other business for the destination."
Linda van Dyke, trade show director for the Gulf States Horticultural Expo, used E-Autofeedback after last year's show in Mobile, AL, and is keen on the new product. "I often work at night, and I can send [the survey] out at my leisure when I have time to think," she comments. And because survey results arrive immediately, bureau heads like it too. "I get the response at the same time as our convention services department—it doesn't go through other people's hands," offers Tom Caradonio, president of the Northern Kentucky CVB in Covington, adding that the reply rate has been "great." Indeed, Myers claims that E-Autofeedback's average response rate is 35 percent, compared to a nationwide response level for electronic surveys of only four to eight percent.
In Charlotte, NC, a new offering from the CVB makes similar use of technology and surveys, but to a different end. In December, Visit Charlotte launched a fee-based service whereby planners can receive detailed group spending reports based on polls taken during their meeting. Going beyond the usual economic impact studies, the highly customizable tool can generate data on a group's ancillary spending, including tax dollars generated for the city, that planners can employ in negotiations with other destinations.
Mike Applegate, Visit Charlotte's director of research, says the new tool differs from typical economic-impact surveys (such as ExPact, from the International Association of Convention & Visitor Bureaus, IACVB) by focusing on a single event: "It's much more powerful in an RFP to quote statistics gathered by interviewing attendees and exhibitors at last year's event as opposed to referencing spending numbers that apply to 'events of this type.' "
"With technology, everything's changed—bureaus have to think differently about how they do business and how they're perceived, to be certain they're reaching out to the right people," says Steven Rugens, CMP, director of meeting services for the American Epilepsy Society in West Hartford, CT. "A lot of it is just about asking." And as a member now entering his third year on the San Diego CVB's advisory board for citywide conventions, Rugens has been doing quite a bit of answering. Some of those discussions resulted in enhancements to the bureau's Web site, including new planner services iLead and iService, introduced in November.
iLead is an online RFP customized for San Diego, explains Reinders. However, unlike what typically happens when planners send RFPs to hotels and receive answers in a variety of formats, iLead arrays properties' responses into a template, "so planners can compare apples to apples," says Reinders. "It's all about making planners' time more valuable," he adds. "If bureaus do the legwork, planners will want to use their services."
iService, meanwhile, helps planners locate suppliers—from computer technicians to live musicians—but allows them to specify which suppliers, which meeting staffers should receive the information, and on which date. In the past, the CVB sent out booking notices about upcoming meetings to all bureau members, and planners had experiences like Karen Sabo's—they got "bombarded" with marketing messages for services they didn't want. Now, explains Reinders, "With iService, they only hear from the suppliers they need, when they need them."
Rugens, for one, praises the new tools. "San Diego's Web site has become much more user-friendly for planners," he notes. "The bureau has been working on this very diligently for the past two years, and the feedback has been very positive."
Business vs. Pleasure
Quick quiz: What does the "V" in "CVB" stand for? Visitors, of course—otherwise known as sightseers who distract the bureau staff from concentrating solely on your citywide. Fortunately for planners, some CVBs are doing away with this diversion altogether, proving that a bureau needn't innovate technologically to make itself more planner-friendly.
As of January 1, the Greater Cincinnati CVB and its just-across-the-river neighbor, the Northern Kentucky CVB, no longer work with leisure travelers, period. Realizing it made more sense to market tourism regionally, both bureaus recently voted to commit one-third of their hotel tax dollars to create a regional tourism bureau, leaving the CVBs to focus exclusively on meetings.
"This gets us both back to our core business," says Caradonio, speaking just minutes after the unanimous vote by his bureau's board of directors to approve the new setup. "It allows us to concentrate all our efforts on meetings and conventions, which is our most quantifiable segment." Adds Alan Welch, CEO of the Greater Cincinnati CVB (and no relation to this writer), "When you try to sell everything to everyone, you end up not being an expert in anything."
Welch also points out, however, that this model isn't the answer for every CVB's marketing challenge. Rather, it's most effective where tourism is a regional phenomenon, as in Philadelphia, where a similar retooling—the inspiration for Cincinnati's effort—was implemented several years ago.
At presstime, it was too early for planners to have had direct experience of either bureau in its revamped capacity, but initial response was positive. One Cincinnati-based special-events organizer calls the reorganization "exciting. Now the bureau will be free to focus on meetings and events, which is great for our industry."
The Name Game
Sometimes renewal can come in the form of a mere name change—such as the one now being considered by IACVB, which in December proposed a new moniker, the Destination Marketing Association. Based on a survey of more than 2,000 government officials, hoteliers, meeting planners, consumers, and others in the CVB world, IACVB found that the term "CVB" didn't resonate with people, explains IACVB spokesperson Maura Nelson. "The new name is a reflection of what our members do," she notes. "What do CVB people do? They market the city."
At presstime, IACVB was still taking public commentary on the new name, which anecdotal evidence suggested was not especially popular among planners. But as Reint Reinders likes to say about bureaus, "Like any business, we have to reinvent ourselves."
SIDEBAR
The Big Easy Gets Easier
New Orleans appoints nation's first planner advocate
Some CVBs bring planners in for focus groups. Others put them on temporary advisory boards. Last fall, the New Orleans Metropolitan CVB became the first U.S. bureau to create a permanent liaison between planners and the city: Donna Karl, director of meetings for 18 years at the American Academy of Pediatrics, became the bureau's vice president of client relations on November 2.
As a planners' advocate, Karl says her goal is "to make New Orleans the most planner-friendly city in the next two years." She's already developing an innovative system whereby planners would submit requests online for parade permits, police escorts, and other municipal government services. Steven Rugens of the American Epilepsy Society, who worked with Karl on his December convention, calls the new position "terrific": "Bringing in someone who speaks your language, and understands what you go through, is a step in the right direction."