|
ONE-ON-ONE - August 2005
by Ed G. Lane
'We're Just Out-Hustling Everybody. It's All About the Hustle."'
The president of the Greater Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau talks about the city's growing clout as a destination
 |
James T. Wood
James T. Wood came to the Greater Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau after serving as the president and CEO of the Greater Providence Warwick (Rhode Island) Convention & Visitors Bureau. He was also the vice president of convention sales and marketing at the Tampa Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau, where he was responsible for coordinating the city’s Super Bowl and NCAA Men’s Final Four bids, the NHL All-Star Game and the successful relocation of the International Softball Federation.
In addition to serving on the Johnson & Wales Hospitality College Advisory Council, he is a board member of the IACVB Destination Showcase Committee. Wood most recently received his Fellow Certified Destination Management Executive from the International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus. |
Ed Lane: How long have you been president of the Greater Louisville Convention & Visitors Bureau (GLCVB)?
James Wood: I started on August 1, 2003. It’s been almost two full years. I was president and CEO of the Providence Warwick Convention and Visitors Bureau for four and a half years before moving here.
EL: How would you rate your first two years in Louisville?
JW: The first two years were about re-marketing Louisville, repositioning the city, tweaking our collateral, getting our message out nationally. The GLCVB has worked hard to drive new business into Louisville. We should really start seeing some big numbers. Reservations are being fed into Louisville’s pipeline and will soon be shooting out of the other end. Our marketing plan is to offer to our world of planners – the people who buy cities for meetings and conventions – what Louisville has to offer.
EL: With regard to re-marketing and repositioning Louisville, how did you achieve that?
JW: It takes an average of nine impressions just to get somebody to phone you, anymore. We’ve worked real hard through viral marketing*. GLCVB has created different Web-based newsletters and custom videos for convention bids. We’ve been successful in all those attempts so far.
We poly-bagged a 24-page brochure with seven different meetings publications so that Louisville’s single-page ad wouldn’t get lost in the whole magazine. The 24-page magazine was about Louisville. We printed 850,000 copies of those, which helped Louisville generate greater awareness and visibility. On the cover of the magazine is the picture of downtown Louisville, shot from Indiana. You can see the river. It was amazing to me how many people didn’t know that Louisville was a river-city. This indicated that Louisville needed to get out there and deliver its message nationally.
EL: What are some of Louisville’s top attractions?
JW: Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom is one of the big drivers for leisure business; so are the Kentucky Derby Museum, Louisville Slugger Museum, the Louisville Zoo, the Frazier Historical Arms Museum, the Science Center, and the Speed Museum. Louisville also has other theaters and smaller museums that target specific tourism niches.
EL: The Frazier Historical Arms Museum is one of Louisville’s newest facilities. How is that facility faring in its first year?
JW: The museum may have fallen short of its projections for visitors. On the other hand, the Frazier’s management has been very happy with what’s happened since the opening a year ago. It’s a history museum. It tells a great story, there are great artifacts to see and there is a certain niche audience that loves that. Planners and conventions that are passionate about history fall in love with the Frazier – instantly.
EL: The Louisville Marriott Downtown recently opened. How important is this new facility in attracting convention business?
JW: Having a new 616-room hotel with a national flag on it is very critical in our effort to drive new business to this community. If you take a look at what’s happening nationally, there are hotel developments being built everywhere. Major hotels are being built next to convention centers in all of the major cities Louisville competes against.
The Marriott, Hyatt, and Galt – those three hotels alone give Louisville a 2,300-room housing package connected to the Louisville International Convention Center. And 3,800 downtown hotel rooms are within walking distance of the Convention Center.
EL: In addition to the convention center downtown, Louisville has the Kentucky Exposition Center (KEC) at the fair grounds. How do these two facilities differ and what types of events does each attract?
JW: Each facility attracts a different audience. KEC is ideal for conventions that require indoor and outdoor space, that may need up to a million square feet of exhibit space under one roof. Heavier trade shows are going to utilize the expo center. The Convention Center downtown is geared toward large meetings with less focus on the trade show portion. The KEC can accommodate up to 40,000 people at a time and the downtown Convention Center is designed for 3,000 to 5,000 people.
EL: What are the trends in convention bookings?
JW: The bureau landed new conventions that have not come to Louisville before. For example, next year Louisville is hosting the National Coalition of Black Meeting Planners – that’s going to be right after Derby weekend. We have an offer on the table right now – a very serious offer – from the National Urban League. We have the Religious Conference Management Association meeting coming in 2007 – a very important convention for Louisville – and the National Rifle Association (NRA) in 2008.
EL: Louisville has invested a lot of money into the restoration of its riverfront. Has this been a benefit from your perspective?
JW: The riverfront amenities improve the weekend traffic; there are a lot of activities for people on the weekends. It’s kind of a segue into eco-tourism – you’ve got that hiking and biking segment that gravitate toward areas with that. When the Big Four Bridge is open and serving both sides of the river, a major connection between Louisville and southern Indiana will be created.
It’s an old train bridge (constructed in the 1890s and rebuilt in 1929) that is no longer in use. It was called the Big Four Bridge because it served the big four industrial cities – Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati. That bridge is east of downtown Louisville – it’s just sitting there with both ends off. The parks have been built, especially on the Louisville side, waiting for that bridge to reopen. There are great plans for it to be a pedestrian walkway – there might be some retail on it – that connects to southern Indiana. The bridge will create a 17-mile loop for biking, jogging, walkers, stroller moms during the week – so we’re excited.
EL: What are Louisville’s needs in order to continue to grow and prosper as a tourist and convention destination?
JW: Competing cities continue to add new product to their communities every year. The arena-siting task force is down to four locations and by October I’m sure they’ll select the right site for Louisville.
The extension of Fourth Street Live is important. Louisville is missing downtown retail. Retail shopping is the No. 1 activity that people do while on vacation. Outside of dining, shopping is No. 1.
EL: Are you envisioning something like Michigan Avenue with high-end fashion clothiers?
JW: Maybe not high-end, but I think the more mid-level shops – like a Banana Republic – expanding Fourth Street Live with retail shops all the way down to the Brown Hotel.
We also need to take a further look at old Louisville and how to embrace the resurgence of this area as a historic destination. People like seeing history, they like walking the streets, and getting a central business district developed in old Louisville would be a big asset.
There are a lot of projects that Louisville needs. Louisville needs to have one major project per year to sustain itself. It’s no different than what theme parks do, nationally.
EL: Would the funding for new attractions be private or public, or some type of joint venture?
JW: New development is going to be a combination of private and public. The city is going to want to get in as inexpensively as they can, but they’re going to have to play a role.
EL: Let’s talk about the uses for the arena. Obviously, the arena will be used as a major sports facility.
JW: The big question really is, who will this arena serve? Who should it serve? To me, it serves the community and most of the community at-large that live here – and that’s the story with most arenas. If you take a look at virtually every professional sports arena, they are all built downtown. If you take the survey I did, 29 out of 30 arenas were all built in downtown markets. That is a trend that Louisville ought to pay attention to. If the arena is for college campus use only, then most of those arenas are built on campuses.
The arena is either going to go downtown or it should be at a college campus. For Louisville, the public ought to decide where the arena should be located. So far there seems to be a lot of energy for downtown Louisville.
EL: Is return on investment an important criterion in selecting the site for the arena?
JW: It has to be considered. Economic development potential and trying to get the building to have a low overhead are important factors. Most arenas lose money, but they’re designed like convention centers to throw off economic impact to the community. Charlotte, North Carolina is a great example where the city built an arena a dozen miles away from downtown. There was nothing else around it. And Charlotte said, “The arena did nothing for us.” They got rid of a perfectly good arena and built another one downtown so they could see greater economic development of new restaurants, shops and businesses to help their downtown market emerge.
EL: Do you envision there might be a special tax on hotels and/or restaurants to help pay for the arena?
JW: I’m sure it will be looked at. Louisville has a high bed-tax right now – we’re at 15.01 percent, which puts us in the high-end of our competitive set. There’s probably not a lot of room to give in there.
EL: If the arena has major sports like UofL and professional basketball, what type of impact will regularly scheduled games have on restaurants and hotels, etc. on game night?
JW: On game night the restaurants fill up before and, believe it or not, during the game, because a lot of people come downtown to be part of the environment. They don’t have tickets, but they like to sit in restaurants or sports bars, hang out with their friends, relax, watch it on T.V. and then celebrate after the game with those that were at the game.
Having an arena puts your city in the national spotlight, your name is mentioned nationally everyday on all news shows. Louisville needs brand recognition. We need our name out there every single day – Louisville wins, Louisville lost tonight – we need that national recognition as a destination.
EL: With the economy on the upswing, more of the public is traveling and hotels are achieving higher occupancy levels. Does that mean that the tax revenues for the bureau will be adequate for the coming year?
JW: GLCVB is properly funded. We’re a tourism/economic development organization. Last year, for every dollar in hotel bed tax that GLCVB received, we brought back $29 to this community. That’s a 1:29 ratio – one of the best in the country. We generated $255 million of economic impact for Louisville from our last year’s marketing plan.
EL: How well is Louisville competing with cities like Memphis, Nashville, Indianapolis and Cincinnati for convention business?
JW: [Of] the cities that we compete with most often for convention business, Nashville shows up everyday, Indianapolis shows up everyday. Recently, when I was in a meeting in Washington, D.C., a gentleman from Memphis came up to me and said, “I got to tell you with you guys, and you’re killing us in Memphis. A year ago, Louisville wasn’t even in our competitive set in our top 10 cities – you were on the bottom and Nashville was high on the list. That has totally inverted – you have now become the city we lose more business to than even Nashville. Our board of directors is upset about it, our city leaders are furious about it, and they want to know what is happening in Louisville. What are you doing to steal business from Memphis?” I told him, “We’re just out-hustling everybody. It’s all about the hustle.”
EL: To what do you attribute your success?
JW: The bureau created a campaign last year called “Lunch in Louisville.” We invited people from all over the country to come to Louisville for the day, view the city, walk it. We’re the first city in America that created this campaign. Others have since followed, but we got a six-month jump on everybody else. We’ve flown in several hundred prospective customers to look at our city.
Louisville’s got to get more planners here to see the city. Once they see it, they’ll like it and they’ll buy it.
EL: What types of things are you showing your guests?
JW: Before they get on the flight here, we give them a Starbucks credit card for $10. We tell them to buy their coffee and pastry, just to get them started. They all love that – it’s just a nice wake-up.
We meet the planners at the airport. We may take them to the lounge at the airport if we have to wait on others. We then give them a driving tour of the Kentucky Expo area, and bring them into downtown.
I do a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation at the Kentucky International Convention Center in the conference theater. From there we do walking tours of the Convention Center, Marriott, Hyatt, we do lunch at Fourth Street Live. We go to the Seelbach, do high tea at the Brown, go to the Galt, visit the attractions on Main Street, finish with a reception over at Churchill Downs overlooking the track on the deck, and then we get them on the plane and send them home. People walk away amazed. They get to see the whole package that we have to offer.
EL: What other innovations in marketing Louisville have you created?
JW: The other campaign is being a platinum sponsor for a company called Conferon Global Services. The firm is headquartered in Twinsburg, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. They have offices all around the country. They are third-party planners. I speak at one of their lunches to about 200 customers each month. We do a full presentation, including a quick video of the mayor giving a pitch, speaking to the people direct. Then we run a ballroom horse race. We selected a great race from Churchill Downs, we have a racing program at each place setting, there’s a number at the table (10 people, 10 horses in the race, whatever number you have on your program is the horse you root for), it’s amazing. We run the race, call the post, people are screaming and cheering, and the winner of the race gets a bottle of bourbon from Maker’s Mark, which is a sponsor with us in this program.
EL: How do you measure success?
JW: These programs took Louisville from 800,000 tentative room nights a year ago to where we have over 2.1 million tentative room nights on the books today. We normally book three years and out; bigger events, three, four, five years out. So right now, in 2005 terms we’re talking to people for 2008, 2009 and 2010.
Louisville has a great product. We’re in a very competitive set and getting new business is going to get even harder as cities continue to chase convention business to drive economic development to their cities. Our bureau will never rest on its laurels.
Ed G. Lane is chief executive of Lane Consultants Inc. and publisher
of The Lane Report.
edlane@lanereport.com
Back to One on One Index
Back to the August Issue
|
