By Staci Elder Hensley
The Journal Record
It’s been more than 10 years since new hotel facilities were built in Norman. Today the town’s explosive growth and changing dynamics are reflected in five new hotel construction projects, ranging from the just-opened 77-room Country Inn & Suites to a 100-room Embassy Suites, now under construction, which will feature a 6,000-capacity convention center.
The addition of the new facilities, especially the convention center, spurred Convention and Visitors' Bureau staff to expand their marketing efforts to take advantage of the additional amenities, said Executive Director Sherri Rogers.
“We have been good at getting state associations here, but it has been a challenge to get any other meetings to come here, because we have not had a large facility except for the Postal Training Center, which is not often available,” Rogers said. “Now all of a sudden we are exploding, and we want to take advantage of this new tool.”
Step one was the development of an annual trade show for meeting planners. “Plan 1: Putting the Pieces Together” is a collaborative effort with the Stillwater CVB, and is modeled on a similar 12-year-old effort by another major university area, Bryan-College Station, Texas. In early April the Norman CVB hosted its first one-stop trade show for meeting planners and group coordinators from Oklahoma and north Texas. Attendees were able to develop contacts, book business and attend five different 30-minute educational sessions.
That initial event was a success, with more than 46 exhibitors and 2,000 meeting planners in attendance. The exhibitors paid $125 for their booth space, and many recouped the expense the same day. The chief benefit for the attendees came from having a wide range of vendors available in one place, so they were able to learn about Norman without the hassle of traveling around town meeting with different business owners.
“We booked two pieces of business that very day – a summer reunion for the University of Oklahoma Police Department, and a statewide meeting for the Oklahoma Farm Bureau,” Rogers said. “Everybody right there, all the vendors, were saying ‘I’ve gotten business today.’”
The event also was helpful in educating attendees – even close neighbors like the University of Oklahoma personnel – about unique new facilities and services now available in Norman, said Norman CVB Sales Manager Kristen Klinge.
The success of the initial Plan 1 event has ensured that it will be an annual effort, in partnership with the Stillwater CVB. Stillwater will host its third daylong trade show in September; Norman will host its second event next April. Each will use the other’s show as a venue to advertise their specific services. The collaboration is an expansion on current efforts – staff from both CVBs attend trade shows around the country together.
“We represent the two major university cities in the state,” said Cristy Morrison, executive director of the Stillwater CVB. “It may be unusual, yes, for us to work together when we’re seen as competitors, but I think we’ll get more business working together than separately.”
No solid figures are available on how much revenue the trade shows will bring to Oklahoma’s college towns, but the figures are expected to be high. Norman, for example, will play host to a 10-day Amateur Athletic Union meeting in July 2008, which will generate an estimated $2.4 million in hotel-related income alone.
The Norman and Stillwater CVB efforts are part of a larger national trend of smaller towns courting meeting planners. University towns, in particular, can bring “a lot of value to the table,” according to Shannon Overby, senior marketing and sales director for the Bryan-College Station, Texas CVB. The benefits include a warmer welcome than larger towns, unique attractions, more economical hotel and dining facilities, and a much shorter travel time between hotels and surrounding attractions and events. Local universities also are a tremendous resource for guest speakers and other professional assistance to this target audience.
Overby organized Bryan-College Station’s initial Meeting Planners Showcase, on which the Norman and Stillwater shows are modeled, as a way to educate Texas A&M University staff about meeting facilities and services in their surrounding town.
“We’ve outgrown two facilities and gone from a tiny event with 18 exhibitors and 50 attendees to more than 70 exhibits and 500 attendees at the last one,” she said. “Working with local people really expands our staff. It’s common for people not to know everything that’s in their own back yard. We educate our local residents, and then they become involved in showing off what we have to offer and spreading the word to their contacts.”
Measuring the specific economic impact of tourism on the communities is difficult, since there is no standard definition of tourism and no designated set of figures that are used to measure tourism-related income. Some cities use hotel/motel tax revenues as an estimate; others extrapolate data from the income generated by specific events.
Norman CVB officials estimate $12 million in tourism income for the city over the past three years, but it’s not known what percentage of the city’s annual income is due to tourism. Bryan-College Station figures are based on sales tax revenue for all of Brazos County, and estimate $322 million in tourism income, making up approximately 19 percent of the retail sales tax revenue, according to CVB President and CEO Barry Biggar. No tourism-related figures are available for Stillwater.
Although exact dollar amounts may not be easy to estimate, the enthusiastic response has given Norman and Stillwater CVB personnel high hopes for their new showcase initiative.
“Next year we will have a much better idea of what Plan 1 truly brought to Norman economically,” Rogers said. “Meanwhile, we got very high marks from our local business owners for what we accomplished.”
