Since everything planned for New Orleans and environs in the near future is on hold, the ability of the larger region to absorb the business is being examined. I wonder how many rooms will be available for some of these events considering how many people may still be in long-term hotel situations around here.

Much care is required for moving meetings
from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Mitchell Schnurman
IN MY OPINION

The Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau is in a delicate position. It's trying to land some of the business meetings scheduled for New Orleans in the next few months, but it doesn't want to appear to be opportunistic.

"We don't want people to think we're taking advantage of a catastrophe," says Doug Harman, the agency's president and chief executive.

His counterpart in Dallas, Phillip Jones, worries about the same issue. To be fair to New Orleans — and to soften public perceptions — the Dallas bureau is offering to swap conventions with the Crescent City. It proposes hosting some of New Orleans' meetings this fall and letting New Orleans have some of Dallas' conventions in the future.

"This is a rare opportunity to reintroduce a lot of conventioneers to Dallas, but we want to do it with dignity," Jones says. "We can't look like ambulance-chasers."

The human toll from Hurricane Katrina rightly remains the No. 1 issue on the public agenda. Until the immediate suffering ends and rebuilding begins, people will be cautious about discussing commercial opportunities.

Behind the scenes, however, there is much at stake. New Orleans is among the leading destinations for conventions and tourists, with 10 million visitors spending $4.9 billion there last year.

On Thursday, New Orleans officials formally canceled all convention business through November, acknowledging that the recovery will take a while.

Donna Karl of the New Orleans convention bureau says the decision affects 150 to 200 events in that time frame, not including others that bypassed the city agency and booked directly with hotels.

Many groups will cancel their events, she says, but most will scramble to reschedule, because their conventions are often a key source of revenue.

Fort Worth looked at the details of more than 100 New Orleans meetings planned for this fall, and Harman says it's talking closely with one prospect.

Dallas has been working with meeting planners representing about a dozen groups, Jones says, and it hopes that three or four will make decisions this week. Most of the prospects have meetings planned for the next six months in New Orleans, but some events are 12 months out.

Of course, other areas are pursuing the same opportunities. News reports have cited Houston, Austin, Baltimore and Southern California among the suitors, and it's safe to assume that every city with a convention center is putting out feelers.

Many won't be able to offer much. In this business, most conventions are scheduled years in advance — sometimes a decade before — because groups have to lock up large blocks of hotel rooms and exhibit space.

New Orleans can accommodate groups with 15,000 members or more, because it has so many hotels and a large convention center.

Fort Worth and Arlington can't bid for the bigger deals, but because of recent additions, Dallas, Austin and Houston have that capacity. The Gaylord Texan in Grapevine is a major convention hotel. And Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla., and Chicago have long been big players in the industry.

The key question is whether a city's convention and hotel space is available when the groups need it — or whether accommodations can be rearranged for other clients. In Fort Worth, Harman is torn over how much energy to put into the New Orleans effort.

His sales staff has been focusing on attracting conventions for the new Omni Hotel, scheduled to open by 2009.

The convention hotel is supposed to make Fort Worth competitive for a larger array of business. Does the agency take its eye off the big picture — and the big deals — to shoot for some of the smaller meetings that might come its way now?

"It's a dilemma," Harman says, "and it's harder to evaluate because you don't know when New Orleans will be operational again."

The quicker the recovery, the smaller the opportunity, and Fort Worth might be better off to focus further out.

Heywood Sanders, a public-administration professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is skeptical of the windfall that may come from New Orleans. He says that attendance at its convention center — the site of so much human suffering after last week's hurricane — has been falling sharply.

The number of events hasn't declined much, but fewer people are going to them. He says attendance at the convention center was just below 600,000 last year, compared with more than 1 million in 1999.

"The convention business is evaporating everywhere in the country, while cities are building more and more facilities," Sanders says.

New Orleans' leisure traffic accounts for much of the city's tourism, and he doubts that the Metroplex will win much of that business.

"People who wanted to go to a jazz festival in New Orleans or to Mardi Gras aren't going to just substitute Dallas or Fort Worth," he says.

Jones insists that the potential gain for Dallas' convention business is significant, and his agency has put a lot into the effort. In addition to the convention-swapping proposal, it has worked with American Airlines so that visitors can change reservations from New Orleans to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport without incurring an extra fee.

The bureau also helped coordinate promotions with area hotels. Some hotels cut room rates for people from hurricane-affected areas, and others have agreed to contribute 10 percent of revenue from relocated convention business to hurricane relief.

Jones says the Dallas convention bureau has hit its goals for this year, but a handful of big events from New Orleans would move the needle.

"We could go from having a good year to having a great one," Jones says.

If so, he can count on getting the chance to someday return the favor to his friends in New Orleans.