CEOs from the nation’s largest travel companies met with senior Administration officials in the White House today to express support for President Obama’s national travel and tourism strategy and urged policies and initiatives that would further economic growth and job creation in the nation’s $1.9 trillion travel industry, which supports 14.4 million U.S. jobs.
“President Obama’s call for a national travel and tourism strategy was one of the most significant developments for our industry in the past decade,” said Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. “The travel industry has the ability – and stands ready – to quickly hire many of the unemployed workers in our country, but to do that we must have policies in place that increase travel to and within the United States. This Administration and most in Congress understand that, and we look forward to bipartisan support for legislation that supports America’s travel industry.” Read More:

The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) today announced support for the Jobs Originated through Launching Travel Act or JOLT Act.

The bipartisan JOLT Act was introduced by Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and co-sponsored by Senators Roy Blunt (R-MO), Mark Kirk (D-IL), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mike Lee (R-UT), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and Marco Rubio (R-FL). The legislation will make it easier for international visitors to come to the United States by reforming the visa process, lengthening visa validity, expediting entry for priority visitors, and expanding the visa waiver program.
“International travelers want to visit America and we should welcome them with open arms,” said AH&LA President/CEO Joe McInerney. “The Jolt Act puts a priority on easing many of the antiquated rules slowing down the process in obtaining travel visas. Passing this legislation will significantly boost the U.S. economy and benefit every community across the country.”   
America's burdensome visa process drives millions of international visitors to other countries at an enormous cost to our economy. Even as world travel grew by more than 60 million travelers between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. share remained essentially flat. As a result, our economy lost $606 billion in total spending from 78 million additional visitors – enough to support 467,000 more jobs annually.
By regaining America’s pre-9/11 share of international travel, the United States could create up to 1.3 million new U.S. jobs and produce $859 billion in cumulative additional economic output. As AH&LA has relayed to Congress, increasing travel to the United States is the most effective form of economic stimulus – creating millions of new American jobs, adding billions to the U.S. economy, and benefitting every community around the country.

The Rundown:
Some would call this a logistical nightmare: 49,000 registrants. 2,098 music festival showcases. 1,221 conference sessions. 1,096 exhibit spaces. 293 film festival screenings. But for Mike Shea, executive director of the popular South by Southwest (SXSW) annual conference and festival in Austin, Texas, orchestrating an event of this magnitude has become second-nature, although it's not without its fair share of harebrained headaches. "One year, massive downpours turned a grassy park into muck and mire, threatening two days of free concerts," recalls Shea. "We decided to blanket the park with hay and we paced the park from end to end and arbitrarily determined that 10 steps equaled one bale of hay. To remove the muddy hay afterwards our solution was [to use] homeless men with pitchforks—four words your insurance company doesn't want to hear." Read more…

 Following three consecutive years of reported decline, the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) has good news to share in its 2011 Index: industry activity increased by 2.7 percent for the year, surpassing the growth of real GDP, which rose by 1.7 percent.
Fourth quarter activity bumped up 3.8 percent compared to the same period 2010, with increases in all four CEIR metrics: net square feet (a 4.2 percent increase), revenue (5.1 percent), professional attendance (3.6 percent) and number of exhibiting companies (2.4 percent). Read More:

Despite falling profits, slashed bonuses and layoffs, Wall Street banks don't appear to be curbing spending at luxury hotels, a key hotel industry CEO says.
One analyst on Tuesday asked Host Hotels CEO Ed Walter whether he's seeing any "sensitivity" from financial services companies around booking luxury chains such as Marriott's Ritz-Carlton. The question was posed during Host Hotels' fourth-quarter earnings call. Read More

Business travel finishes 2011 with stronger growth than expected, and the industry will see steady expansion in 2012 that is greater than anticipated GDP growth, according to the latest Business Travel Quarterly Outlook – United States from GBTA, sponsored by Visa. Despite the uncertainties in the global economy, the business travel environment will remain healthy. Full story...

Madison, WI – Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center is pleased to announce that the results of the direct spending analysis of conferences and conventions held at Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center in 2011 were up by approximately 23.5% from 2010.  The total economic benefit is an estimated $46,515,496 to Madison, Dane County and the State of Wisconsin in 2011, up from $37,630,656 in 2010.
“We attribute this growth to hosting four more conventions in 2011 than 2010,” said Bill Zeinemann, Director of Marketing and Events at Monona Terrace.  “Several were larger scale events including Congress for the New Urbanism, National Wildlife Refuge Symposium, and WI Society for Human Resources Management.  These events with greater numbers of attendees using more hotel rooms deliver increased economic impact to our community.”
The analysis was conducted by Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, LLP using data primarily from a direct spending survey conducted in 2010-11 that asked recent conference and convention delegates and exhibitors to estimate their direct spending in a variety of categories.  Results from 1,541 surveys were tallied. 
Monona Terrace is located at One John Nolen Drive in Madison and is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a guided daily tour at 1 p.m.  For additional information and hours, call (608) 261-4000, TTY (608) 261-4150 or visit mononaterrace.com.

Certain, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based event management software for the global meetings and events industry, released its 2012 predictions on technology trends that will drive increased business value from events. Based on insight from visionary industry leaders, customers and partners, Certain has identified key shifts that it believes will shape the industry over the next 12 months. Full story...

Merton’s Law
An infestation of mink was playing havoc with the eco-system of a rural area so, to encourage a proactive community response, the local authorities instituted a bounty of $5 for each mink turned in at the local sheriff’s office. The scheme was successful and after a month or so the evidence of mink had decreased dramatically. However, despite the obvious decrease, some local farmers continued to turn in significant number of mink against the $5 bounty. Eventually the authorities discovered why. Certain farmers were actually breeding the mink to claim the bounty. This is a perfect example of what sociologist Robert K Merton called “the law of unintended consequences” – you build a plan to prevent or stop something and end up causing a bigger problem.
Read the rest - by Padraic Gilligan, VP, Industry Relations MCI and VP Ovation Global DMC

The rancor over the General Service Administration's (GSA) irresponsible behavior continues to mount. Committees on Capitol Hill held back-to-back hearings on Monday and Tuesday examining the October 2010 GSA Las Vegas conference and other inappropriate spending. These were the first of four hearings scheduled this week on the GSA conference issue. The Senate today held the first of two hearings on the topic.
In both House hearings, it was encouraging that the overall dialogue did not revolve around the value of conferences or meetings, although a select few members did express support for restricting government travel. Members of Congress focused most of their attention on lavish expenditures by a small group of GSA employees, failures to follow federal travel regulations, insufficient oversight and disciplinary actions by GSA leadership and a lack of transparency in GSA's budget. Read more...

Group meetings, conferences, and trade shows are very important pieces of your property's business. However, even though the economy is on the upswing, we are not out of the woods yet. Threats abound when booking hotel group business. The US Travel Association has identified the following 3 obstacles to meetings:

1. Corporate and Government Discouragement of Travel. In 2009, President Obama's comments that discouraged travel to Las Vegas had an estimated effect on the industry of $10 billion in that year alone. Add on the "AIG effect" in the same year and the "$16 muffin" last year and the industry has taken a real beating.          Read More... Dede Mulligan

In the wake of a General Services Administration (GSA) Inspector General's (IG) report investigating an October 2010 conference, the U.S. Travel Association urged federal lawmakers today to carry out a measured and appropriate response to the findings of the report.

"The findings of the IG report clearly detail instances of inappropriate spending and poor decision making on the part of federal employees," said Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. "At a time when Washington is laser-focused on creating jobs and curbing wasteful spending, we hope policymakers will remember that responsible travel can help accomplish these goals. We know through repeated studies that travel for face-to-face meetings increases worker productivity in the private and public sectors. We also know that meetings, conferences and events are critical to our economy and support 845,000 U.S. jobs. We hope Congress and the Administration will consider these facts when deciding how to appropriately respond to the event from October 2010."

When the daily avalanche of emails and voice messages gets overwhelming, it’s so tempting to retreat to my office and start typing replies and returning phone calls. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I can make.  

No matter what industry we’re in, we’re all in the people business. We’ll only be successful if we really get to know our customers and colleagues. Many of my tech marketing clients are so busy that they now prefer texting to even emails or calls. Skype, WebEx and audio calls are convenient and create the illusion we’re actually having a meeting -- but nothing beats the power of a truly personal, face-to-face connection.  Read More:

Hiring an event planner may seem, to many people, to be an unnecessary and added expense. However, precisely the opposite is true. An event planner can save you large amounts of money, in proportion to the size of your event.
You may be thinking of planning and handling your own event. Before you do so, bear in mind that the total amount of money you end up paying may exceed what you would otherwise have paid, plus the added service of an event planner. This is because you can benefit from many discounts and perks that an event planner has access to.
Here are 5 ways that an event planner can save you money.

The U.S. Travel Association will lead an initiative to convince members of Congress of the importance of meetings to their districts and to the nation’s economy as a whole. 
 “The goal of this campaign is to build new champions. Read More:

The popularity of communicating virtually—whether via email, instant messaging, LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media channels—has had a significant impact on the speed at which information can be obtained. Virtual communication has also led some marketers to question the role face-to-face communications can play in building a brand. Full story...

With a stress score of 49.85, Event Coordinator lands the #6 spot on the list of most stressful jobs, according to the 2012 CareerCast.com Job Stress Report, an annual survey of 200 different professions that measures work environment, job competitiveness, and risk. Full story...

The government did not pay $16 each for breakfast muffins at a Justice Department conference, according to Hilton Worldwide, which hosted the 2009 conference in Washington. Even the IG's report this week acknowledged the government got more than muffins for its money. Full story...

I've been reading all day about the $16 muffins the Department of Justice served at one of its conferences, and I finally got curious about this. Is it really true? So I went to the DOJ Inspector General's website, got the report, and searched for "muffin." The following paragraph looks fairly impenetrable, but go ahead and plow through it anyway. Full story...

Here we go again: another "lavish" conference, another "junket," another "boondoggle." Right? That's what some voices of public perception are trying to tell us... even though a federal regulatory agency has already "defended the spending as a whole." So what is it this time? On the heels of public incomprehension surrounding justifiable conference costs in relation to the supposedly nefarious Muffingate "scandal," here's the scoop on Fox News. Full story...

Get ready to see your co-worker in a compromising position. Nationwide, holiday parties are in a slump – but in New York City, venues are lining up the shot glasses. “We definitely have seen a change this year,” said Laura Altman at Bowlmor Lanes.  “People aren’t really holding back.” Full story...