Convention hall for travel and tourism summit a stunner

Richard N. Velotta / Las Vegas Sun

Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority President and CEO Rossi Ralenkotter participates on a panel at the Global Travel and Tourism Summit at Aria on Wednesday, May 18, 2011.

The set-up at most general conference gatherings is always the same: a stage with a podium or a head table for panelists and rows and rows of seats for the audience.

Many of the bigger gatherings have a large video screens so the speakers can be seen from the back rows, sometimes hundreds of feet away.

But in hosting the Global Travel and Tourism Summit, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and the convention staff at Aria — MGM Resorts International’s showcase property at CityCenter — wanted the venue to be memorable and for delegates never to forget they were meeting on the Las Vegas Strip.

So they worked with Las Vegas-based show and production designers to come up with a gathering place worthy of a global audience of 1,000 that had come to hear U.S. Cabinet speakers, CEOs from the world’s top tourism companies and the president of Mexico.

With assistance from The JGS Group, owned and managed by Julie Gilday-Shaffer, and with technical production management by Peter Emminger, Aria set up a stadium-style venue-in-the-round on 270 degrees of a circle nine rows high. The stage was a replica of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” sign.

The design placed every delegate within about 60 feet of the center of the stage.

Every seat had a view of at least one of the 12-by-23-foot, high-definition projection screens that showed the speakers and special video presentations. Between the video screens were two 10-by-100-foot Las Vegas skyline murals depicting most of the city’s resort properties.

At the ends of the projection screens were two more 11-by-45-foot projection surfaces that carried icons depicting the theme of the talk or panel.

Panelists were parked on mood-lit, white, contemporary swivel lounge chairs while keynoters stood behind the panelists’ seats at an elevated podium.

Overhead, between stage lights, was a diamond-shaped acoustic panel on which the LVCVA’s Las Vegas logo was projected.

There was a touch of United Nations at each seat. Attendees were issued smart phone-sized MP3 players and headphones so they could listen to presentations in Japanese, Mandarin or English.

There were only a few technical glitches. During the first presentation by a Mandarin speaker, no one explained how to unlock the channel settings on the MP3 players.

It didn’t matter.

Everybody was dazzled by the sight of the Venetian, the Wynn, Luxor and the Rio on the wall.

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