In her recent presentation at Affordable Meetings National in Washington, D.C., Christine Duffy, president and CEO of Maritz Travel, characterized the recent meetings industry crisis as a major storm at sea.
“This storm has made some industry people fearful and others mad,” she told the audience. “But we’ve all learned a few things from it. We’ve learned that meetings, events and jobs got cut because we’ve been invisible. We’ve done a lousy job of educating everyone from people in our own industry to federal policymakers about the value of meetings."
Duffy said “winds of damage” have come from several directions: the economic crisis, negative comments about meetings from leading government officials, and the AIG Effect that followed the revelation that insurance executives stayed at a luxury resort after their company took a federal bailout.
She said that hospitality companies and tourism destinations have incurred massive losses in the storm’s wake, resulting in thousands of jobs lost. As examples, she said Maritz lost $150 million in meetings business that was cancelled between October and December 2008 and noted that Marriott International CEO Bill Marriott described 2009 as the worst year in the company’s 81-year history.
Crises offer more than challenges—they also offer opportunities, Duffy also said during her presentation.
U.S. Travel Advocacy
Not taking things lying down, Duffy and other hospitality and tourism leaders are working as never before to educate and influence meetings stakeholders, government policymakers at all levels and even the general public about the value of meetings and events.
Support has come from the U.S. Travel Association, the travel and tourism industry’s lobbying advocate to policymakers, opinion and business leaders, and the general public. The Meetings, Incentive, and Trade Show (MIT) Council was formed earlier this year as an adjunct of U.S. Travel to give those industry activities more advocacy traction in Washington and elsewhere.
Duffy co-chairs MIT with Larry Luteran, senior vice president of group sales and industry relations for Hilton Worldwide. Other members include leading executives from hotel and entertainment companies and major CVBs.
“MIT is about leveraging the expertise of U.S. Travel in their lobbying work with policymakers,” says Luteran. “We want to shape some of the rhetoric as it relates to MIT.”
He adds that the industry has been in a crisis since 2008 “because there wasn’t a unified voice of value about what meetings deliver to the economic well-being of communities across the land.”
According to Luteran, one of MIT’s principal concerns is using industry association research projects to create a convincing story and show the business value that meetings have on all levels. While organizations like ASAE, PCMA, MPI, NBTA and AHLA do their own research projects, Luteran sees a need to form a critical mass of aggregated data.
The MIT Council plans to meet in Chicago this fall to clarify how its industry activities fit into the larger travel and tourism picture that U.S. Travel addresses with legislators and other government officials.
Other aspects of the MIT/U.S. Travel agenda:
- Continue media outreach about the meetings industry and ROI of business travel
- Overhaul of MeetingsMeanBusiness.com and PowerofTravel.com for better accessibility and usefulness in communicating why business travel matters
- Educate and engage newly elected Congressional representatives and senators about the importance of face-to-face meetings
- Develop legislation (for the new Congress that convenes in January) to promote incentive travel programs by installing a tax reduction to program participants
- Grassroots cultivation of the 10 million people employed in the travel industry via Virtual Travel Town Hall at travelcoalition.org
Geoff Freeman, executive vice president for U.S. Travel, says advocates face an uphill battle with policymakers, particularly in Washington.
“It’s odd that 535 people who come together every week in a group called Congress think that others who come together are wasting their time,” he says. “So many just don’t understand the bottom line value of activities called meetings, incentives and trade shows.”
According to Freeman, research is key to building a grassroots network and education about policies that are harmful to the industry—and it must be ongoing to be effective.
“Some data needs to come from outside parties like academics and allies,” Freeman says. “It was great when Marriott got out there and defended meetings, but where was the head of the Harvard Business School?”
MPI Initiatives
MPI President and CEO Bruce MacMillan speaks frequently to the industry about a need for meetings advocacy at all levels. At the recent Convention Industry Council annual meeting in Baltimore, he talked about the importance of demonstrating business deliverables.
“We must demonstrate the value of face meetings on business. You can’t solve problems or create a culture if people aren’t face to face,” he said. “When meetings don’t show up, people lose jobs. It’s a tough story to tell but once you get it out there, the light goes off that the local community will be hurt. Regulations must be written so they don’t inhibit travel, raise taxes and so on. In the past, we’ve been a soft target.”
CVBs are among industry organizations that need to spread the word about the value of meetings he added.
“They raised bed tax in New York to the point that it impacted meetings,” he told the audience. “Legislators everywhere and at every level must be educated. We are not the golden goose they can kill. If trade show revenue gets taxed, for example, it would be devastating. And this could happen if we aren’t diligent.”
Theresa Davis, MPI’s director of strategic communications, says MPI has identified the business value of meetings as one of the five strategic areas for which it will continue developing content to empower and enable members with research data and actionable tools for advocacy.
“Research has been done by several institutions outside our industry, like Harvard Business Review, Oxford Economics and Forbes Insights. But nobody was aggregating the research to help us speak the language of business,” she says. “So we’ve had an independent agency comb data and create the Meetings Deliver (see sidebar) white paper. We’ve also developed a toolkit on how to use the research.”
Davis says people in the industry need to be armed with good research for a variety of advocacy needs.
“If you are an MPI member in Halifax, and there is a struggle to get a new bond passed to finance a convention center, you need this kind of research to prove the ROI,” she says.
Davis and Freeman are among many industry people who believe the new recovery initiatives stress the need to build advocacy at the grassroots level.
“The power of a building a travel coalition can be great,” Freeman says. “We have a long term goal of a million industry employees who are informed and activated. It’s the great key to preventing what happened last year from happening again.”
