How do you sell a convention city that has been shut down by one of the worst natural disasters in American history? How do you sell a convention center that became, in a few terrible days in September, a symbol to the world of despair, neglect, and destruction? How do you keep a convention bureau going when its funding source — hotel room tax revenue — has been wiped out for at least six months?

These are questions Kitty Ratcliffe never dreamed she'd have to grapple with when she left her position as president of the Jacksonville (Fla.) & the Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau less than a year ago to take on the newly created position of executive vice president of the Metropolitan New Orleans CVB. Her mission was to spearhead a major campaign to improve customer service and bring more convention business to the Big Easy, already the fifth most popular convention destination in the country.

She works now from the headquarters of the International Association for Exhibition Management in Dallas, her home in New Orleans having been damaged by Katrina, and the CVB office in downtown New Orleans having been moved temporarily to Baton Rouge. Two weeks after the disaster, the bureau canceled all convention center business through March 31, a shut-down affecting hundreds of convention groups.

Ratcliffe spends hours talking to planners and to the far-flung bureau staff. Her mission now is to keep New Orleans alive as a convention destination, a destination that, when it returns, will still be a place like no other.

“We've gotten overwhelming industry support. Groups tell us they will come back; they want to help,” Ratcliffe says. “I believe them.”

TOO MANY QUESTIONS WITH NO ANSWERS

To say that the situation in New Orleans is fluid is not just a bad joke. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, whose dramatic plea for evacuation help was televised around the world, was just a few weeks later urging residents and businesses in some areas to come back, even though the city had no safe drinking water. A few days later, Hurricane Rita bore down on the Gulf, and once again the Big Easy was evacuated. Rita's rains caused a breach in the patched-up levee system, sending flood water back into part of the city.

When New Orleans really will be ready for convention business remained an open question as we went to press at the end of September. The city's vaunted French Quarter survived Katrina relatively intact, as did the Garden District, another tourist spot. The Hyatt Regency New Orleans, one of four hotels with a thousand or more guest rooms, is closed through 2006, having suffered substantial damage during the storm. Most major hotels, however, expect to open for visitor business either by December or at the end of March. Already many of them are housing FEMA workers and others involved in reconstruction efforts.

Moreover, most hotels in the area are holding groups to their meeting contracts for events that are booked after they reopen — though this is, again, a very fluid situation. (For various hotel companies' cancellation policies in New Orleans as of September 19, see our round-up at http://meetingsnet.com/ar/meetings_gulf_coast_hotel/index.htm.)

The convention center repairs, including a complete redo of interiors, will be completed well before the end of March, as will those to the Louisiana Superdome, another shelter for desperate evacuees. The airport, which has already resumed some commercial passenger service, looks toward having fully restored service by the end of the year. But the big question at this point: When will the city have the services, businesses, and people in place to handle visitors and groups — buses and bus companies, taxis and taxi companies, shop workers, tour guides, hotel workers, restaurant workers? And what about the chefs, the musicians, and the artists?

“We are going to lose a significant portion of our population,” Mayor Nagin said in a press conference in Baton Rouge on September 22. He predicted that the city would end up with half its pre-Katrina population of 500,000 as many evacuees spread around the country decide not to come back, and as housing for those who do will be limited for some time due to reconstruction. The city may have the facilities and attractions for visitors and convention groups, but at what point will it have the people to run a hospitality economy?

The question may sound insensitive in light of what the citizens of New Orleans have suffered in lives lost and homes destroyed. But given that most of the storm's damage has been the low-lying residential areas, which will take some time to rebuild, and given that a huge portion of New Orleans economic engine derives from visitor expenditures, getting the visitor economy up and running is of necessity a major priority.

And what about potential public health hazards caused by the flood, such as mold and pollution? A comprehensive assessment of environmental damage was just getting off the ground in late September, although one test of Lake Pontchartrain in mid-September by the Environmental Protection Agency showed much less toxicity than expected.

These are the types of questions that weigh most heavily on convention groups with meetings in New Orleans booked after March 31, 2006. One planner with a professional society, speaking on condition of anonymity, puts it this way: “Our convention is booked for next May in New Orleans. We want to support New Orleans, but there are a lot of unknowns — what shape the city is going to be in, how our registration is going to go. We hope we don't have to use it, but we've got to have a Plan B.”

THE SOUL OF AMERICA

As we went to press, broad-based efforts to rebuild the region's tourism were being launched, even as the city remained partially under water. “We're here today to announce our plan to rebuild the cultural economy of the State of Louisiana,” said Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, at a press conference in Baton Rouge on September 21, as reported in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. “We have to rebuild the metropolitan area of the City of New Orleans because this area is the soul of America.”

As the news report, written by Rebecca Mowbray, stated:

“At Landrieu's side were tourism and convention leaders from across the state and national tourism industry executives, all wearing stickers that said ‘New Orleans, Louisiana Rebirth: Restoring the Soul of America.’ Landrieu called for business assistance and workforce development for all entities in the state's tourism industry, which employs 120,000 people and generated $9.9 billion in visitor spending last year. A national and international advertising and public relations campaign is also needed to restore the image of New Orleans and Louisiana after images of flooding and looting were beamed around the globe.”

On hand at the conference were Roger Dow, who heads up the Travel Industry Association of America, and Jonathan Tisch, chairman of the Tourism Business Roundtable and CEO of Loews Hotels, which has a property in New Orleans. TIA and the TBR have pledged to work with the Louisiana hospitality industry to help rebuild tourism. TIA has set up a Katrina job bank (www.katrinajobs.org) for hospitality industry workers, and both organizations sent an open letter to federal policymakers on September 20, asking for federal help for the area's tourism industry.

The groups recommended federal funding for tourism groups, such as the New Orleans CVB, because they have no budget now that their members are shut down and tourism taxes are not being generated. They asked Congress to increase the business meal tax deduction and to restore the spousal travel deduction to boost visitation and spending along the Gulf Coast.

On September 22, Louisiana Congressional delegates put forth a request for an estimated $250 billion recovery package for the state. It was not clear at press time whether this aid was in addition to, or part of, the aid package that President Bush announced in his nationally televised speech a week earlier from Jackson Square in New Orleans. Bush called for the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone that would be part of “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.”

TWO REALLY BIG QUESTIONS

Clearly New Orleans is going to be rebuilt, and there will be an international campaign to “rebuild” perceptions of the city after scenes of desperation and abandonment, looting and anarchy were broadcast to the world in the days after Kristina landed.

But what kind of city will the new New Orleans be? A sanitized, tourist-only version of its former gritty self? Or still a place where the music, the gumbo, the people, and the culture make it a place like no other?

“This is an opportunity to remake the city better than it was before,” J. Stephen Perry, CEO of the New Orleans CVB, said in the Boston Globe in mid-September.

Another question that had not been answered as Hurricane Rita sent flood waters back into parts of New Orleans: Will New Orleans be rebuilt to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, the severest storm? The city's floodgates and levees were built to withstand a Category 3 storm. Katrina was a 4.

According to a news report by Knight-Ridder printed in September 21 editions of many of the chain's newspapers, protecting against a Category 5 storm would involve not only building stronger levees, but ideally, restoring a million acres of wetlands in Louisiana to cushion against storm surges. That project is estimated to cost $18 billion and would take at least a decade.

The Army Corps of Engineers hopes to have the city's levees restored to pre-Katrina levels by June or July. At present, there are no plans to expand the levees or to add floodgates because the Corps doesn't have the authority to do so. According to the Knight-Ridder report, the upgrades needed to enable New Orleans to withstand a Category 5 hurricane would take an act of Congress.

Remembering the Mississippi Gulf Coast

The last time I saw Steve Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, we were talking about a hurricane that was brewing off the coast of Florida. He said something like “Well, that's not a big worry for us.” We were at a meeting of CVBs this summer in San Diego. I thought of him right away when I saw the pictures of the Biloxi after Katrina blew through.

Steve survived Katrina, thankfully, but the Mississippi Gulf Coast, often forgotten in the Katrina coverage, suffered tremendous damage. Along with homes and businesses, its thriving casino industry, which employed 14,000 workers, was dashed. State law required that the casino portion of a casino/hotel operation had to be on the water. Consequently, when Katrina hit, accompanied by its huge storm surge, the casino barges were devastated.

“The hotel portions (of the casinos) are still here and can be repaired — it's just a matter of how quickly,” says Richer. And with the substantial investment companies such as Harrah's Entertainment Inc. have in the region, he expects the casinos to come back. “Now it's a question of getting the legislature to quickly evaluate whether or not to change the rules so that the gaming portion doesn't have to be on the water,” he says.

If the legislature doesn't approve that change, however, it's uncertain that investors will rebuild casinos on water. After Katrina, that would be a real gamble.
— RM

AFTERMATH

• Number of jobs in New Orleans tied to tourism before Katrina: 81,000
• Number of hotel rooms shut down in all of Louisiana: 28,481
• Percentage of New Orleans population that is likely to be living in the city two years from now: 50%
• Estimated total cost of federal aid to rebuild the Gulf Coast: $200 billion
• Area, the size of the United Kingdom, that has been declared a disaster by the Federal Government: 90,000 square miles