We've blogged previously (including here and here) about the “AIG effect”–the booking-erasing phenomenon hotels and resorts suffered after 100 top American International
Group salespeople were wined and dined for a week in September 2008 at the swanky St. Regis Resort in
Monarch Beach–just days after the federal government committed $85 billion of
taxpayers' money to bail out the insurance giant.
Hotel and meeting planners in one hula-riffic state are now–finally, mercifully–seeing signs the AIG effect is ebbing.
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“Hotel and meeting planners say they're seeing
renewed interest in business-related travel to Hawaii, particularly in
CMI business–conventions, corporate meeting and incentive business,” David Wilkening writes here.
“The Hawaii Tourist Authority (HTA) says after a downturn, business
meetings are making a comeback in that state.”
David Uchiyama, HTA's vice president of brand
management, calls it “a slow but significant recovery for a crucial piece of the
state's $12 billion visitor industry.” He explains Hawaii has long depended on
business travelers to supplement the peaks and valleys associated with
leisure travelers.
For the first five months of the year, the number of visitors to
Hawaii for conventions, corporate meetings and incentives was down 12
percent, but marketers have used what they have booked to generate CMI
leads and business that could fill rooms and resorts significantly in coming months and years.
“Momentum is going up; we have some good numbers [with corporate
meetings], so that's very encouraging when we're seeing a lot of business
driven in 2011 and 2012 as well,” Mike Murray, vice president of
sales and marketing for the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau's
corporate meetings and incentives division, says in the piece.
Murray adds that incentive travel is also strong, indicating a pent-up demand among Mainlanders to visit the Pineapple State.
Still, when it comes to CMI travel, a stigma from the AIG effect lingers: most companies and hotels are shying away from disclosing which groups are booking convention business in
Hawaii–and, especially, how much they're spending.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.