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event space, including breakout rooms, board rooms, “Mad Men”–era bars and lounges, a 500-person theater, and the 1,400-square-foot Grand Ballroom. Our next mode of transport was a tuk-
tuk — a sort of three-wheeled, motorized rickshaw popular in some Dutch cities — which zipped us over to the Wilhelmina Pier, a former dock from which many ships left for the United States during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Today the pier is home to some of Rot- terdam’s tallest, most modern buildings, helping give the city its local nickname “Manhattan on the Maas.” Six venues on the pier have banded
together to market themselves as Congress Island. We met with rep- resentatives of the initiative at one of the venues — Hotel New York, which occupies the former headquarters of the Holland America Line, the pas- senger line that transported hundreds
of thousands of people to the United States from all over Europe. The 72-room property has seven high-ceil- inged meeting rooms, and is steeped in the history of Holland America, with large turn-of-the-century photos of blank-faced emigrants, original boardroom furnishings, and other period décor. The other venues making up Congress Island are the 1,535-seat Luxor Theatre; the solar-powered Floating Pavilion, consisting of three experimental “hemispheres” that are designed as examples of sustainable, “climate-change-proof” architecture; the historic Cruise Terminal Rotter- dam, with a variety of function spaces; LP2, in the Las Palmas “cultural warehouse,” with a 4,100-square-foot exhibit hall and a 150-person audito- rium; and LantarenVenster, a cinema house with five screening rooms and a multifunction hall.
My final trip in Rotterdam was also
via tuk-tuk, to Witt de Withstraat, a lovely street lined with cafés, art galler- ies, restaurants — and Hopper, a bright, casual coffee shop where my Rotter- dam Marketing escort and I enjoyed fresh sandwiches and good, strong coffee. Then it was back to Rotterdam Central for an express train to Amster- dam Airport Schiphol, and my flight home, during which I realized, belat- edly and somewhat sheepishly, that I hadn’t learned a word of Dutch during my entire trip. Everyone I met — not just the hospitality and travel profes- sionals who hosted me, but everyone
— spoke perfect English. It’s one of the many things that make Holland friendly and welcoming, and primed for international business.
. —Christopher Durso For more information: nbtc.nl
SEPTEMBER 2013 PCMA CONVENE
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