Rossi Ralenkotter
VEGAS INC
No one really had to convince people at the Global Travel and Tourism Summit that business travel is critical to the industry.
After all, many of the 1,000 attendees at the conference at the Aria had to fly thousands of miles to get to Las Vegas for the two-day event that wraps up today.
But the sponsoring World Travel & Tourism Council and several speakers weighed in with points supporting business travel that they hope land in corporate boardrooms worldwide.
The London-based council has developed a report correlating business travel with corporate economic performance. Tourism Economics, a subsidiary of Great Britain’s Oxford Economics, joined with the council on the report that found:
• Business travel has a return on investment of $10 for every travel dollar spent.
• Business travelers surveyed worldwide estimate that about 50 percent of their prospective customers became new customers with in-person meetings compared with 31 percent without such a meeting.
• Four out of five executives — nine out of 10 in China — agree or strongly agree that face-to-face business meetings are essential to their organizations’ success and that business travel improves a company’s chances of increasing sales.
The statistics are particularly relevant to Las Vegas, which hosts about 18,000 conventions, meetings and trade shows a year. Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority President and CEO Rossi Ralenkotter was one of the panelists on Wednesday’s business travel panel.
“We’ve seen visitation up for 13 consecutive months in Las Vegas,” Ralenkotter told attendees. “Our convention business is up 11 percent in the first four months of this year and our room rates are up about 10 percent. From the Las Vegas standpoint, this is the greatest time to book a convention or meeting here, because the value proposition is there and it’s all about the experience.”
“When you go to a convention or trade show, you get to meet the competition and see what the competition is doing, and you get to see customers,” he said. “It’s all about that, and that’s what we’ve got to market and sell.”
He noted that Las Vegas has three of the 10 largest convention centers in the United States to accommodate meetings of all sizes. With that kind of capacity, the city is capable of accommodating co-locating conventions — separate events for groups with common interests that benefit by meeting at the same place at the same time.
Other panelists represented tourism entities in Singapore and Dubai. Panelist Gerald Lawless, executive chairman of Dubai’s Jumeirah Group, said his nation is making strides to attract business it hasn’t traditionally gotten because of the country’s customs in the treatment of women.
Lawless said some hotels are employing all-female staffs on some floors, offering privacy, exclusive access and special amenities to business women.
Panelists acknowledged that advances in technology have led some companies to conduct video-conference meetings, slicing into travel budgets.
“It’s (videoconferencing) a good means to keep in touch,” said Kah Peng Aw, chief executive of the Singapore Tourism Board. “But when things change in, say, 24 months, there are things you have to see in person.”
The tourism conference wraps up today with presentations by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Ted Turner, CEO of Turner Enterprises.