This year's enormous U.S. Travel Association confab, International Pow Wow, isn't set to take place until next month in Orlando, Florida, but already organizers are beavering away, planning next year's gathering in San Francisco. Along with the World Travel Mart in London and the annual global travel industry version of Woodstock in Berlin, Pow Wow ranks among the leading travel biz meetings on the planet. So, it takes a lot of planning.
Why should you care? Well, with more than 400 international journalists set to cover it, Pow Wow, which includes media tours, news conferences and networking opportunities galore, will go a long way toward shaping the stories you see, read and hear in the next year about traveling to and within the United States. And the sales opportunities that all that face-time - the event lasts five days - affords to people who run hotels, airlines, tourist boards, tour companies, cruise-ship lines and the like will help determine what those people put on offer for travelers.
Travel-biz people from more than 70 countries are expected to attend the Orlando edition of Pow Wow. There will be some 1,100 information booths in South Hall at Orlando's Orange County Convention Center and 5,000 travel biz types on hand to visit them.
For the host city, the event, which changes venues every year, is a big deal.
Next year's International Pow Wow will be held at San Francisco's Moscone Center, and tourism people in the northern California city are even as we speak drawing up to-do lists, planning social and business networking events and anticipating receipts.
According to numbers-crunchers at the nonprofit San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau (www.onlyinsanfrancisco.com), the host organization for the 2011 Pow Wow, to be held next May 21-25, the big travel show will generate $4.5 million in event-related spending (hotel rooms, labor, convention center food and beverage sales) and $2 million in spending by individual attendees (restaurant meals, shopping, taxis). In the long term, all those journalists parachuting into San Francisco are expected to write 300 to 400 articles about the city; the stories will appear in media outlets with a combined circulation estimated at 100 million. By the SFCVB's reckoning, that worldwide exposure is equal to spending $5.3 million on advertising to promote the city.
So, yes, travel is big business.
U.S. Travel, Pow Wow's sponsoring umbrella organization, was for years known as the Travel Industry Association of America, till it changed its name recently. U.S. Travel (www.ustravel.org) doesn't yet know where it will hold Pow Wow in 2012, but the host city for 2013 has already been selected: It's Las Vegas, baby.
Come 2013, what happens in Vegas will presumably NOT stay in Vegas.
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Berlin, Re-born
Most of the travel world limped through 2009, but last year was a good year for Berlin. The German capital celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the hated Berlin Wall - and visitors to the city rose 4.5 percent, even in the depths of the Great Recession.
Celebrations and remembrances of the momentous changes of 1989 were big all over Europe, as I can attest. On Nov. 9, exactly 20 years after the Berlin Wall was breeched, I happened to be visiting Rome. When I walked to the Spanish Steps, I saw hundreds of people milling about, heard a band warming up and spied a temporary replica of none other than the Berlin Wall sprawling across the centuries-old steps. Europe was partying. Europe was happy. It has been two decades since the end of the Cold War. Europe, Germany and Berlin are reunited.
Absent another big bash - the 21st anniversary just doesn't have that same cachet - what can Berlin do for an encore?
Plenty, according to the chief executive officer of Berlin Tourismus Marketing, Burkhard Kieker, who says that the Fall of the Wall has put Berlin back on the travel map - and gives the city a platform for crafting future changes.
"This was for Berlin a starting point,'' Kieker said at a stopover in California. "Berlin was really off the map. When the wall came down, it took us quite a while to rebuild Berlin.
"In the last century,'' Kieker continued, "there were three major European capitals: London, Paris and Berlin. But this was gone.''
Now, though, Berlin is feeling good, upgrading its infrastructure, enjoying its new status as a capital of cool among artists and rolling out new attractions to draw travelers.
"Berlin is attracting so many young people from all over the world,'' Kieker observed. "It is affordable. It is receptive to new art. Can you imagine being a young artist? This reputation spreads through word of mouth to others. A certain atmosphere attracts others who want to see what's going on.''
How affordable is affordable? According to Berlin Tourismus, a room that would cost 139 euros in New York, 111 euros in Paris and 107 euros in Rome costs 76 euros in Berlin.
Eleven new hotels are slated to open over the next year in Berlin, says Kirsten Schmidt, Berlin Tourismus's director of public relations in North America. Most will be small "urban design hotels.''
On the cultural front, Berlin's promoters are touting the re-opening, last Oct. 17, of the once-war-ruined New Museum, with its superb ancient Egypt collection. For several years now, Berlin - so rich in museums, opera houses, symphony venues, clubs and galleries - has staged an annual Long Night of the Museums, during which time major institutions stay open until 2 a.m. The price is right: There isn't one. The annual Berlin International Film Festival, too, is one of the best in the world; I covered it back in the day for the San Francisco Examiner and Motorland (now Via) magazine, on my first visit. How committed are Berliners to cinema? I saw people lining up for a film-showing at 8 a.m. on a Sunday. In a snowstorm.
I am happy to see Berlin's revival. The city has had much to overcome: war, occupation, division and a delicate reunification. It is a work in progress, but the progress is real, and the reborn metropolis is one of the most compelling destinations in Europe.
Since my most recent visit, in 2006, the city has opened a state-of-the-art central train station for long-distance rail travel, and I am keen to see it. Berlin is now busy expanding and modernizing Schoenefeld airport, which will give the city renewed status as an international air hub; Tegel airport is too small and long ago fell below the standard expected of a major capital city. This is changing, too, at last.
The Wall? Seven-hundred meters of the symbol of Cold War division survive the tear-down of two decades ago, and it is of course a major tourist attraction.
Celebrations and remembrances of the momentous changes of 1989 were big all over Europe, as I can attest. On Nov. 9, exactly 20 years after the Berlin Wall was breeched, I happened to be visiting Rome. When I walked to the Spanish Steps, I saw hundreds of people milling about, heard a band warming up and spied a temporary replica of none other than the Berlin Wall sprawling across the centuries-old steps. Europe was partying. Europe was happy. It has been two decades since the end of the Cold War. Europe, Germany and Berlin are reunited.
Absent another big bash - the 21st anniversary just doesn't have that same cachet - what can Berlin do for an encore?
Plenty, according to the chief executive officer of Berlin Tourismus Marketing, Burkhard Kieker, who says that the Fall of the Wall has put Berlin back on the travel map - and gives the city a platform for crafting future changes.
"This was for Berlin a starting point,'' Kieker said at a stopover in California. "Berlin was really off the map. When the wall came down, it took us quite a while to rebuild Berlin.
"In the last century,'' Kieker continued, "there were three major European capitals: London, Paris and Berlin. But this was gone.''
Now, though, Berlin is feeling good, upgrading its infrastructure, enjoying its new status as a capital of cool among artists and rolling out new attractions to draw travelers.
"Berlin is attracting so many young people from all over the world,'' Kieker observed. "It is affordable. It is receptive to new art. Can you imagine being a young artist? This reputation spreads through word of mouth to others. A certain atmosphere attracts others who want to see what's going on.''
How affordable is affordable? According to Berlin Tourismus, a room that would cost 139 euros in New York, 111 euros in Paris and 107 euros in Rome costs 76 euros in Berlin.
Eleven new hotels are slated to open over the next year in Berlin, says Kirsten Schmidt, Berlin Tourismus's director of public relations in North America. Most will be small "urban design hotels.''
On the cultural front, Berlin's promoters are touting the re-opening, last Oct. 17, of the once-war-ruined New Museum, with its superb ancient Egypt collection. For several years now, Berlin - so rich in museums, opera houses, symphony venues, clubs and galleries - has staged an annual Long Night of the Museums, during which time major institutions stay open until 2 a.m. The price is right: There isn't one. The annual Berlin International Film Festival, too, is one of the best in the world; I covered it back in the day for the San Francisco Examiner and Motorland (now Via) magazine, on my first visit. How committed are Berliners to cinema? I saw people lining up for a film-showing at 8 a.m. on a Sunday. In a snowstorm.
I am happy to see Berlin's revival. The city has had much to overcome: war, occupation, division and a delicate reunification. It is a work in progress, but the progress is real, and the reborn metropolis is one of the most compelling destinations in Europe.
Since my most recent visit, in 2006, the city has opened a state-of-the-art central train station for long-distance rail travel, and I am keen to see it. Berlin is now busy expanding and modernizing Schoenefeld airport, which will give the city renewed status as an international air hub; Tegel airport is too small and long ago fell below the standard expected of a major capital city. This is changing, too, at last.
The Wall? Seven-hundred meters of the symbol of Cold War division survive the tear-down of two decades ago, and it is of course a major tourist attraction.
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