EW ORLEANS IN JULY ISN’T SUPPOSED to be cooler than New York City — but that’s just what the mercury indi- cated when I landed at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport for Destination Marketing Association International’s (DMAI) 97th Annual Convention, which was held at the 1,110-room Sheraton New Orleans on July 20–22.
The convention kicked off that first evening with a well-attended welcome party in the
world, is more important than ever.” After the opening general session, I at-
tended a “Mega Session” on “Event Impacts: Quantifying Your DMO’s ROI,” where DMAI rolled out its new Event Impact Calculator. Adam Sacks, managing director for tourism economics with Oxford Economics, which developed the tool with DMAI, demonstrated how it measures the economic value of an event in terms of direct, indirect, and “influ- enced” spend; jobs and wages; local taxes; and ROI. DMAI’s con-
vention drew more than 1,000 attendees from 10 countries, including 710 destination-mar- keting profession- als, educators, students, and industry part- ners from 274 destinations. Three hundred individual exhibi- tors and sponsors represented
hotel’s ground-floor Pelican Bar. Destination executives and exhibitors mingled and caught up while a jazz band fronted by a gravelly- voiced singer played in front of a wall of windows looking out onto Canal Street. The next morning, following “Beverages
& Beignets” for breakfast, DMAI’s opening general session — sponsored by Convene — featured journalist Lisa Ling, who shared some of the stories that have inspired her during her career, including landing in a Red Cross airplane in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 1994 to cover the Afghan civil war, when she was just a 21-year-old reporter for the high-school news network Channel One News. “Ultimately,” Ling said, “travel for me has changed my life.” She added: “The need for people to interact with people they may not be familiar with, in other parts of the
30 pcma convene October 2011 GLOBE TROTTER: Travel has changed
journalist and Convene- sponsored keynoter
Lisa Ling’s life, showing her that “the need for people to interact with people they may not be familiar with is more important than ever.”
90 DMO/CVB industry providers on the convention’s trade-show floor. The meeting ended on a high note, with a rousing performance at the closing general session by Grammy Award–winning Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Playhouse Revue, and some good-natured sparring by the oddest couple in American poli- tics, Mary Matalin and James Carville, who discussed how they became two of the Big Easy’s biggest advocates. When you’re in New Orleans, Louisiana native Carville said, “you’re in a real place, with real people, in a real culture.” n