Tradeshow Tales

February 26, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

In a Jan. 25 small-business oriented blog written for the online edition of The New York Times that was entitled “Are Trade Shows a Waste of Time?” a guest blogger, Jay Goltz, wrote about his experiences at a few recent picture framing tradeshows.

Goltz had just returned from a show in Italy and had been to one in Las Vegas the month before. Even though these shows and others he also had attended had seen declines in attendance, Goltz wrote that the mood on the Vegas showfloor, as an example, was anything but somber.

“Hope seemed to have been replaced by confidence and fear by a plan,” he added. “People were enthusiastic. Suppliers were relieved.”

According to Goltz, two positive things were driving the framin...Read More

February 12, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

My colleague, Senior Assistant Editor Stephanie Corbin, and I recently went to a luncheon hosted by the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau at a hotel in Los Angeles at which Mark Theis, the bureau’s executive vice president, touted everything positive happening in the Windy City right now.

I spoke to Theis at a reception held beforehand, and he said the L.A. stop on the CCTB roadshow was the first of six cities in the next few weeks.

The purpose of the roadshow? Everyone who’s following the news going on in Chicago right now knows the ci...Read More

February 1, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

I have written several stories in the past year about the struggles convention and visitors bureaus have had to endure with visitor attendance dropping in most locales, resulting in falling bed-tax funds.

In turn, a lot of bureaus have had to cut staff, institute furlough days, cut salaries and bonuses and slash marketing and advertising budgets.

It’s a Catch-22 situation, though, when a city’s bureau is tasked with promoting the destination, and their funds to do so are diminished.

Money has been so tight that a lot of cities have had to not only cut back on their travel to industry meetings where face time with tradeshow and meeting planners is crucial, but also, in a time when they should be more aggressive than ever, they’ve ...Read More

January 25, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

No one likes to see a city lose big tradeshows with their enormous economic impacts and badly needed jobs for thousands of people (except maybe the cities that the shows wind up in), but that’s exactly what’s been happening in Chicago.

 

Two high-profile tradeshows already have left the Windy City citing high labor costs, and it’s rumored that two more – the Intl. Home & Housewares Show and the Natl. Restaurant Assn. Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show – have yet to sign on past next year’s shows.

 

With all of this hanging in the balance, the Metropolitan Pier & Exposition Authority, which oversees McCormick Place and Navy Pier, d...Read More

January 12, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Let's face it: People are tired of feeling down about this recession. Everyone's looking for proverbial the light at the end of the tunnel. At the Professional Convention Management Assn.'s Annual Meeting, Jan. 10-13 at the Dallas Convention Center, it seems like that light might just start to be shining. 

First off, the final numbers still need to be tallied, but attendance was up, compared with last year's event in New Orleans. That's definitely some good news in the wake of travel budgets being cut, meetings being canceled and several associations cutting back on their staffs. 

The other good news was association meeting planners I spoke to overwhelmingly said they, too, saw gains in attendance at their meetings in the past year. Why? Because their members were hungry for information and saw value in attending the meetings to get it. ...Read More