At a recent international travel trade show, a display promoting the United States as friendly for meetings contained the word "Welcome" over an image of two people riding horses on an undefined American landscape.
That image didn't sit well for a panel of sales leaders from convention and visitor bureaus in a session about marketing destinations for business events during Destinations International's Annual Convention in Portland last week.
The problem? The photo catered to the leisure traveler while the destinations were there to entice the events planner.
Meetings and conventions remain a strong portion of many destinations' overall visitor strategy, with the sector producing more than 40 percent of all U.S. business travel spending in 2024, according to the Global Business Travel Association. But when the imagery used to market to planners doesn't reflect actual meetings, panelists agreed the opportunity for more events business can be lost.
A coffee mug and a beach doesn't cut it
Kavin Schieferdecker, the San Diego Tourism Authority's CSO, recalled the imagery the destination deployed to attract meeting planners when he arrived in 2021. The marketing campaign included an image of a sole coffee mug on the beach, with waves in the background. It was fine for a leisure travel image, but not the desired marketing for a meeting planner, he said.
"We love water," he said. "But 99 percent of attendees who attend an event don't set foot in the ocean. But they want to be near the water, they want to be inspired by it."
After a $450,000 investment in a new campaign, San Diego's new approach pictured an aerial view of the city's convention center and surrounding hotels by the ocean, a simple but subtle way to tell meeting planners where the destination sits and how close its meeting space actually is to the beach.
Visit Denver is taking a similar approach. Lee Ann Benavidez, CSO for the CVB, said her own bureau sometimes struggles with default imagery of the region's natural beauty for any segment, but understands that's not enough to attract business events.
"You think of the mountains when you come to Denver, but that's not what I'm selling a meeting planner," she said. "We have to be careful of not telling the story of what I want to be doing. The convention center is downtown. I have to sell the story of downtown and sometimes that can be challenging. It's a downtown area so we really have to have an appropriate story."
In her previous role with the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority, she saw firsthand how that destination understands the markets it serves.
"They understand the segments," she said. "They treat the entertainment, casino, leisure and group customer [separately]. They think of what they need to see, not what they want to see."
When it comes to attracting meeting planners to Denver, the bureau focuses now on the convenience of visitors being able to take a light-rail train from the airport to downtown, with a compact walking footprint in downtown once they arrive. A recent campaign focused on a woman wearing sunglasses, seemingly at ease at Union Station where light-rail travelers can catch that ride to the airport.
Group travel on the rise
The importance of nailing the message comes down to the increased importance of the group travel market, said Schieferdecker. San Diego hosts about 50 citywide conventions each year, nearly half of which are medical conventions. Up to 35 percent of those medical conventions bring in an international crowd.
Those numbers are indicative of the larger importance that meetings play in the travel industry, said Curt Cottle, senior policy advisor for the National Travel and Tourism Office, who was also on the panel. Business travel spending in the United States reached $538.5 billion in 2024, according to the GBTA, Cottle said. That was up 7.5 percent from the prior year and a new record of activity. Meetings and events generated $217.8 billion of that impact.
"The growth is there, the market is there," Cottle said. "The key message is there is opportunity."
