Having just returned from visits to six of our member cities in just over a month I am struck by how important issues have become like computing visitor spending, effective relationships with the local hospitality community, “stay to play,” all issues relating to room contributions and commissions, troubling issues with a few third party room booking services, and how to compute possible return on investment before the bid.

In our recent CSEE modules in Las Vegas we attempted to discuss most aspects of economic impact and visitor spending plus current issues and best practices concerning the hotel industry.

We missed the rest of you, and could probably go back and repeat the two sessions without going over much of the same material. This tells me we can never spend enough time addressing every issue above.

I will address visitor spending in the next few lines and go on to the rest of the topics in coming days.

Economists spend much of their careers on issues relating to spending and resulting impacts. I personally believe things would be better if we stuck to room nights and estimates of direct visitor spending. Unfortunately that’s a tough challenge. Some of us are locked into computations with multipliers that tend to produce large numbers. If we start counting direct spending only our monthly and annual numbers will look like we are failing to hit our marks.

Please keep things as simple as you can. Stress estimates and not fact. Provide some information on how the number was computed. Try not to get into issues like the creation of new jobs…they happen, but not due simply to our efforts. Leave all of the “extras” to academia!

At the end of the day, our members are making things better for the communities served. This can be reflected in visitor spending, the economic impact of that spending, an increase in room nights, or by improving the quality of life for our fellow residents.

The latter is what got many of us started in the first place!

-Don