the April 2009 Issue in PDF Format - Trade Show Executive

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Continued from page 17
Putting Up Their Dukes
The tourism industry is fighting back. A new multimillion
dollar advertising campaign says the attacks
on travel are costing a lot of jobs and slams Congress
and the Obama administration for rhetoric that is
drastically dampening the market for business travel.
Travel executives say high-end business meetings and
incentive trips, which have been maligned as ill-advised
and wasteful, are the lifeblood of the $740-billion
industry, creating more than $100 billion in spending
and one million jobs. “The first people who suffer
are the men and women at the front desk, the bell
staff and the taxi drivers across this city,” said Chuck
Bowling, executive vice president at Mandalay Bay.
Local politicians such as Las Vegas mayor Oscar
Goodman, asked the Administration to apologize for
the comments and Nevada lawmaker Rep. Shelley
Berkley pleaded for the attacks to stop.
Yanking Campaign Contributions?
In addition, the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) has
launched a plan to reverse the setbacks to the industry
by focusing on explaining the impact on employment
and resisting any attempts by government to regulate
where and when companies can hold meetings. USTA
president and chief executive Roger Dow, trying to
stop this from becoming an epidemic, did not rule out
the possibility that some members – which include the
nation’s biggest hotel chains – could yank campaign
contributions to lawmakers critical of business travel.
Travel executives including Disney Parks and Resorts
chairman Jay Rasulo and Jonathan Tisch, chairman
and chief executive of Loews Hotels, traveled to
Washington to lobby Administration officials and
members of Congress. The executives proposed a set
of event planning standards limiting an event’s cost
and asked to roll back legislation that would limit big
trips and meetings by companies accepting taxpayer
money.
What can we expect for the future? Hopefully,
efforts by the travel executives will be effective in
preserving the industry. But since no one in the
Administration or members of Congress have recanted
any of their statements, I think it is certain that similar
attacks will continue. This behavior is consistent with
other recent attempts by government to gain some
control of the banking and auto industry. Using the
economic crisis as an opportunity to intervene in the
private sector seems to be the new trend and the trade
show industry will have to adapt and eventually decide
how to address this emerging issue. It appears large
scale education on the serious nature of trade shows
and how such events promote the development of new
products and emerging businesses may soon become a
necessity. TSE
Continued on page 20
18 April 2009 Trade Show Executive www.TradeShowExecutive.com