Everyone Wins The role of a CVB is to ‘grow the collective good,’ according to Maura Gast.
actually achieve Silver. The equally important part is that we are operating the building in a responsible way.
We attract a lot of corporate business, a lot of short-term, which is this market in general. We are still working on our headquarter hotel. We control this entire 40-acre site that the convention center sits on. There are about seven acres set aside for a headquarter hotel, for which the city is in the middle of an RFP process. It has it down to a short list. Hopefully we will be able to make an announcement in the first quarter. If we are able to pull it all together, that will open likely at the end of 2014. And then on the other end of the site would be where an entertainment project will go.
That is also the timing for the light-rail system to get into DFW Airport. Where the convention center is, we are actually almost equally situated between DFW Airport and Love Field. Love Field is in the middle of a major modernization project that will end in 2014. DFW Airport is in the middle of some massive upgrades. We are sitting in the middle of both airports, both of which are going to be serviced by a light-rail-line connection.
It is spectacular — beautiful by day, beautiful by night. All the outdoor spaces that we put in — patios, covered walkways, and big staircases — people are using them formally. I guess part of what makes me so joyful about it is how the things we fought really hard to make happen — like access to the outdoors — we are seeing people use.
We have gotten our base-level LEED certification. We were actually four points short of Silver, so we have gone back and resubmitted. We should find out probably in the next month or two — we may
I think what the hotel certainly will do for us is we will see the mix change. We will see more true association conventions. We have really worked very hard as the CVB. We are putting the same resources in terms of attendance building to our consumer customers — event organizers — that we would give to our convention organizers. Because it is in everybody’s best interest to see all of those events succeed. What we are being very careful about is making sure that we are not competing with our hotels. This is about growing the collective good.
‘There is an elegant strength to this structure.’
In general, I still think as an industry we do a lousy job when we try to tell people what we do, because we refuse to use common language. That is still my soapbox. I think part of that is because the nature of the hotel business has changed. If you are the general manager of a hotel, you are managing a real-estate asset these days, whereas you used to be an important piece of the civic community.