be golf. What is a first-tier golf destination? Is it Palm Springs, or is it Pinehurst, N.C.? In the performance standards that we have in place for the
industry, we don’t say first-, second-, or third-tier cities.We talk about first, second, and third levels, and we base it strictly on number of hotel rooms. So a first-level city would be 30,000 rooms; a second-level city would be from 30,000 to 10,000
“In the performance standards that we have in place for the industry,we talk about first, second, and third levels.”
rooms; and 10,000 rooms and belowwould be a third-level des- tination. These are rooms within the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). It’s the same MSA that Smith Travel [Research] would track. If the Consumer ElectronicsShowwantedtomove their event,
that decision is going to be based on convention-center space. Another city might have the convention-center space, but they might not have the rooms. That’s a hypothetical, but it lends itself towhywedon’t say this is [a] tier-one, tier-two, or tier-three [city], because we don’t want to be comparingdestinations unfairly.
I think that most people understand what a “gateway city”
is—mainly, in the United States, on the coast, typically, with a lot of airlift. But you go down the list, and you have Dallas and Chicago, mainly because of airlift, and then you have Miami and Boston, New York, L.A., San Francisco—they all receive international travelers. So that’s a different perception. That doesn’t mean they’re a tier-one city, but they’re an international gateway city. That’s another example of why we don’t get into ratingthe tier cities. I think in terms of second- and third-tier city definitions,
APEX, through CIC, doesn’t have a description of what a tier- one city is, but they do define a tier-two city. It is where the air- lift, the convention-center space, the number of hotel rooms, and location lend itself to medium-to-small-sized meetings. We [consider] the average-sized meeting to be 175 people and
under. You’re talking about a lot of different types of meetings that are beingheld. CICjust came outwith the statistic that there are 1.8 million meetings a year—and there are a lot of differ- ent perceptions about what kinds of meetings those are. The needs are different. From a standardization standpoint at DMAI, it really gets
down to the number of hotel rooms. If you start talkingabout levels of cities, it’s strictly the need for hotel rooms, not neces- sarily convention-center space.We don’t anticipate that that will change.