In the Face of Change

Hot seat: Katherine Sidor,
former executive director of the
Housatonic Valley CVB

When Katherine Sidor, former executive director of Connecticut’s Housatonic Valley Convention & Visitors Bureau, suspected her CVB was about to go under in spring 2003, she went directly to the budgeting board.
    “In May, the governor had been talking about getting rid of some districts,” she recalls, “and I knew what that could mean for us. I lined up multiple budgets, depending on how long we’d have left: three months, six months, a year. I started winding down the outside contracts so everyone got paid. I prepared the contracts for next year, too, of course, in case I was lucky enough to be wrong. I wanted at least to protect the reputation of my board when we folded.”
    Such turmoil is hardly unprecendented. Across the country, CVBs have found themselves in a profoundly mobile industry, promising or threatening fundamental changes in the way they do business. Following is an exploration of major transitions and how CVB staff have risen to conquer considerable challenges.

Connecticut
When Connecticut found itself with drastically diminished tourism funds in 2003 and no fewer than 11 distinct CVBs, the state legislature slashed more than budgets. In October of that year, the newly established Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism called for a reorganization of the 11 bureaus into five and left Sidor unemployed.
    The blow, says Sidor, was devastating. “I had colleagues who had been in their positions for 10, 12 and 13 years, who had already weathered so many storms for the state of Connecticut that they didn’t think it was real. Very few of us had really been preparing for the ax to fall.”
    Although the Housatonic region had consistently outperformed Hartford and New Haven in revenue generation, according to Sidor, her bureau was dismantled and absorbed into the newly delineated Connecticut Northwest, along with neighboring counties Litchfield and Waterbury, the latter of which provided most of the new bureau’s small staff as well as the site for the new headquarters.
    Kay Schreiber, former sales manager for the Housatonic district, survived the consolidation and moved to the new streamlined composite as sales manager. The Connecticut Northwest office “had a really wonderful atmosphere,” she says, “but the truth is, no matter how passionate you are about tourism, six people cannot possibly know every event and every venue in a district with 48 towns. The real local knowledge just isn’t there anymore. Certainly not like it was before.”
    Schreiber left the bureau to take her current post as manager of City Center Danbury, a marketing and business development agency for the city’s downtown.
    But Paul Mayer, executive director of the Central Regional Tourism District, another postconsolidation entity, disagrees with Schreiber’s concerns. “I think the consolidation increases our level of expertise,” he argues. With a domain that’s expanded from Hartford exclusively to 46 towns along the Connecticut River, “we know more now about the areas surrounding Hartford than we ever did, and that helps our clients.”
    Now based in New York City and seeking a new job, Sidor notes that while Connecticut’s overhaul might be unique, similar scenarios are playing out around the country. “CVBs have evolved from a desk in a chamber of commerce to what they are today,” she says. “Taking that for granted, though, makes us all vulnerable.”

Greater Cincinnati
Elsewhere, some consolidation initiatives are crossing state lines. In late 2004, the Greater Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitors Bureau both voted to donate one third of their budgets to a new, as yet unnamed regional tourism organization. The new entity, expected to be up and running this July, will handle all leisure tourism efforts, leaving the area CVBs with a streamlined, meetings-only mission. “We’re still working out the physical structure of what all this will look like,” says Tom Caradonio, above, president and CEO of the Northern Kentucky CVB, “but once we’ve freed up all our work to pretty much 100 percent meetings, conventions and the like, we’ll be even stronger.”
    The move is in line with Northern Kentucky’s game plan of the past several years. Since its structural refocus on meetings in 2001 and its elimination of visitor-center outposts in 2002, the bureau had already set its focus on group business, a tactic that has kept the new Northern Kentucky Convention Center, in Covington, in the black, according to a preliminary study commissioned by the two bureaus.
    “There are definitely people who think taking $1.3 million out of our budget seems backwards,” says Julie Kalvert, vice president of communications for Cincinnati’s bureau. “But setting aside those funds for leisure travel actually will cost us less in the end, and it will allow us to fully focus on our convention center.”
    But can two areas that often compete for business be marketed under one umbrella? “Territorialism is natural,” acknowledges Kalvert. In the interest of fair collaboration, the regional body will not be run or staffed by personnel from either bureau, she says.
    Cincinnati, meanwhile, is still awaiting the fruits of a $160 million expansion of its Cinergy Center in mid-2006.

San Jose, Calif.
When San Jose announced in late 2003 that it would be joining the ranks of cities with separate management teams dedicated to their convention centers and facilities, the San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau saw trouble.
    “We took a hard look at the models this industry provided [for separately marketed convention center authorities],” says Dan Fenton, executive director of San Jose’s CVB, “and everywhere we looked we saw conflict.”
   To Fenton, the differing priorities of convention centers and CVBs i.e., fiscal year vs. long term, revenue for the center vs. revenue for the city made for a management pairing that was distinctly at odds. “And for the customer,” Fenton adds, “it was absolutely not seamless. Whether you were talking about sales or on-site services, planners would have to speak to the CVB and then deal separately with the convention center reps for no reason other than that they worked separately.”
    The thought of San Jose’s bringing in a private management company to handle the city’s convention facilities seemed even more distasteful. “With a for-profit group,” Fenton notes, “if you are choosing between, say, booking a Rolling Stones concert or bringing in 20,000 people with the Association of Natural Scientists, the choice isn’t always going to come out on the side of what’s best for San Jose’s long-term future.
    “We realized that what we needed was a private, nonprofit team made up of real San Jose stakeholders running our convention center,” Fenton continues. “The parties who were most invested in the state’s success needed to be the ones involved.” Once the CVB recognized the need, they set out to fill it themselves.
    In response to San Jose’s RFP, the bureau proposed its own management corporation, Team San Jose, led by Fenton. Arguing that integrating the CVB and convention center authority so intimately would save the city money by cutting down on redundancies and would raise productivity by ensuring clear communication between all hands in the process, the bureau won the bid. Team San Jose took on managerial control of the San Jose Convention Center in July 2004.
    While the win clearly was a coup for the CVB, Fenton says the real winner is the meeting planner. “We can negotiate much more nimbly than we could have otherwise,” he says, “and, without losing sight of the convention center’s need to remain profitable, we can give planners what they need, when they ask for it.” Outside of San Jose, he notes, a bureau usually “will close the deal on a convention and only be able to provide a nonbinding letter of agreement while the planner waits for the convention center to send a real contract in the mail.”
    And while Team San Jose is responsible for the convention center’s revenues within the fiscal year, bundled into Fenton’s proposal was a modified set of criteria for measuring the convention center’s success, addressing broader benefits like destination prominence and long-term business.
    Fenton also enlisted San Jose’s labor and hospitality management sectors, along with representatives of the local arts community. Promising and delivering multiple seats on the Team San Jose board to all four groups, Fenton has arranged a sympathetic and passionate network of support.
    “The typical president of a local labor union will have if not an adversarial at best a distant relationship with hotel managers and with the CVB,” Fenton says. “Our union presidents are on the same team as we are.”
    Adds Fenton, “Even if this isn’t a cookie-cutter model that every city can take on, we do need to rethink this antiquated baton pass that happens between bureaus and centers.”

Charlotte, N.C.
It was in the interest of rethinking the baton pass that Charlotte, N.C., assembled an advisory committee to look at the city’s destination marketing, although the result was one that the San Jose CVB had expressly tried to avoid. Calling together a roundtable of the private Visit Charlotte CVB, the public Auditorium-Coliseum-Convention Center Authority and the local Hospitality & Tourism Alliance, committee director Ron Kimble headed up a discussion that revealed various redundancies between the CVB and the convention center. It wasn’t until Visit Charlotte’s executive director Melvin Tennant announced his departure for the top job at San Antonio’s CVB, however, that Kimble and his colleagues took the opportunity to effect some substantial structural changes.
    On July 1, 2004, Visit Charlotte, previously an independent entity, was merged with the government-run ACCCA and subsumed into the newly minted Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority. Although the CVB has retained its name and identity, primarily for the comfort of planners used to dealing with a bureau, executive director Mike Butts, above, now reports to CRVA executive director Tim Newman, and the ultimate responsibility for the CVB lies with the CRVA’s government-appointed board.
    “Of course we knew what the fears would be,” Kimble says. “From the CVB perspective, there would have to be a fear that the facility’s management arm would dominate the organization and have a heavier weight in the decision-making process. And from the ACCCA’s perspective, there would have to be a concern that the group would lose sight of the facility’s need for revenue. We’ve made sure not to let either of these concerns materialize.”
    The CRVA has taken pains to ensure an evenly balanced board of directors, with both arms of the organization getting equal representation.
For Butts, however, fairness of numbers is only part of the picture. What will keep the merger reasonable and safe, he says, are the shared priorities and working relationships the CVB and ACCCA demonstrated before the merger was even mentioned.
    “It’s important for all of us in local tourism to make sure that the convention center is healthy and losing as little money as possible,” says Butts. “Bureaus think they need to give away the convention center to get good conventions. If there isn’t revenue for the building, though, you end up running a very unhealthy business.
    “Partnerships are where everything is going,” Butts adds, “and I think we’re setting a great example for other regions to follow. People are always anxious about a merger that’s inevitable. In Charlotte, though, we’ve come through the tunnel, and it wasn’t a train; it really was a light. And we’re glad to see it.”

THE NEWCOMERS

At a time when a number of CVBs around the country find their budgets, branches and occasionally morale on the wane, some smaller cities are cobbling together new bureaus with a healthy dose of realism and confidence.
    A new Virginia CVB, the Fairfax County Convention & Visitors Corp., has only nine months under its belt. Although the district was fielding proposals for an official bureau as early as 10 years ago, tourism and meetings were handled by an unnamed pocket of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority until a recent influx of sympathetic tourism suppliers started filling leadership seats at the chamber of commerce. Now, the CVB has its own identity and budget: one quarter of a new 2 percent bed tax.

Prepared for takeoff:
The Visit Fairfax board

    Executive director C. Arnie Quirion is looking to the future and outside consultants for answers. “The vast majority of our new board is not terribly interested in how things have been done in the past,” Quirion says. “We want to know what’s been done and what’s worked, but what we’re looking at is what else can we do now.”
    In New Jersey, the Meadowlands Liberty Convention and Visitors Authority, representing the state’s offerings between Giants Stadium and the Statue of Liberty, was only recently transformed from a committee in the chamber of commerce to an independent nonprofit organization.
    Convincing regional legislators that tourism deserved keener representation was easier, says executive director James Kirkos, in light of the region’s upcoming developments. Two of them, a 700-acre EnCap golf complex and a 4.76 million-square-foot David Rockwell-designed amusement park called Meadowlands Xanadu, each bear a development cost upwards of $1 billion.
    “Luckily,” says Kirkos, “while we’re waiting for the big additions, we have some time to grow up and become the full-fledged CVB we’re becoming. But even without EnCap and Xanadu, which won’t be around for three or four more years, we still have a sports complex, retail centers, a downtown and several meeting hotels right now, and they all deserve a push.”
    Elsewhere in New Jersey, Kimberly Stevers’ newly formed Capital Region Convention and Visitors Bureau also is pushing hard, but Stevers echoes Kirkos’ patient tone. “We have quite a bit to do, but our timeline isn’t clear just yet. The whole industry especially with an organization like this is organic. But we’ve set up our priorities. We’re setting up our budget. We’re looking forward to what’s ahead.”
    Hired by New Jersey’s Mercer County after it decided to take a more regional approach to tourism and replace the pre-existing Trenton CVB with one representing the entire Capital Region, Stevers is supported by one part-time administrative assistant as well as the satellite presence of the Trenton Visitors Center, the new incarnation of what was formerly the CVB.
    The first step for Stevers, rather than advertising a hospitality community, is cultivating it. The area’s hotels are thirsty for the services of a CVB, Stevers notes. “Right now,” she says, “my phone is ringing off the hook with hotels calling to say, ‘Tell me what I can do to increase my room nights.’”
    Of course, starting up a CVB entails more prosaic preparations as well. “The first thing I did was start writing website copy and set up the phones,” says Marla Roe, from her desk at Texas’ new Frisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, currently staffed by Roe, her assistant and one part-time volunteer, as well as the occasional young freelancer. “I’ve been paying my kids a nickel out of my own pocket for every envelope they stuff.”
    For Roe, a recent transplant from the CVB in Dallas, where envelopes were stuffed by one of 17 employees, the move has been drastic but exciting. “An endeavor like this is really about working from the ground up,” she says, echoing the enthusiasm of her veteran cohorts. “And I’ve been having more fun than I’ve had in a long time.” -- M.D.R.