‘Moving Away From the Need to Define the Different

Tiers’ Karen Kotowski, CMP, CAE, CEO

Convention Industry Council (CIC)

FUTURE CONSIDERATION: Karen Kotowski believes that set tier criteria

may be unnecessary, but that the issue is worthy of further discussion.

I know thatwestill have“second tier” as a term in the APEX glossary, and I did a little research

to see if I could figure out where that came from. The CIC glos- sary was made up of several different organizations’ glossaries, and I’m assuming at some point they thought it was a good idea to just have one industry glossary. So they gave them all to CIC, who combined them all into one—and that became the APEX glossary. But we couldn’t figure out whose glossary [the “sec- ond-tier city” definition] came from, which might have been

“When planners are looking for attributes when selecting a city, is such specific criteria going to help them make a decision?”

helpful in order to get some insight into why that designation was included. I think we might be moving away from the need to define the

different tiers, for the reason that the way you select a city is very dependent on what the particular needs of your group are. I’m not sure that a lot of people really use those terms as much anymore. [CIC’s] Standards Review Committee just this past year went

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through all 4,000 terms [in the glossary] and they’ve eliminated quite a few that are either outdated or are just [not industry-spe- cific] words, such as “table” or certain food items. “Second-tier city” did stay in, but it’s something that we might look at in the future.We’re going to have a process for evaluating indus- try terms and adding new ones, and this might be one term that we have a deeper discussion on—what does it mean, is it still valid, do people still use those terms? Either we make it more definite or we decide if we even need those [distinctions] anymore. Many of what have been classified as second-tier cities can

do big meetings, either because their airlift has increased or their convention center is bigger—and then, whose definition do you use for big meetings? It means different things to different peo- ple. And what would be the reason for making those distinc- tions? How would it help planners? Would planners just eliminate [certain cities from consider-

ation] just based on those factors? I mean, planners with small meetings bring them to first-tier cities.When planners are look- ing for attributes when they’re selecting a city, is such specific criteria going to help them make a decision? And if it doesn’t help the planner, how would it help the des-

tination? It might actually be hurtful to a destination that might not want to be labeled a second- or third-tier city.