Orleans recented ranked No. 3 in the nation in a study of top convention host cities — no small feat in an ever-increasingly competitive marketplace.
What propels us to the top? Not just our built-in culture, but our warm and caring atmosphere are often cited as big selling points, but they are just a few pieces of a total package it falls on Stephanie Turner to promote.
As senior vice president of convention sales at New Orleans & Company, Turner’s job is to bring in the bookings, and New Orleans’s economy needs her to be successful.
In a recent chat with Biz, Turner explained the complex world of convention sales, what type of conference is secretly booming in New Orleans and how a “Built to Host” philosophy is helping the city secure bookings decades into the future.
Why are conventions an important type of tourism?
If you think about New Orleans, we have such incredibly iconic events like Mardi Gras, French Quarter Fest, Jazz Fest, all the festivals, all the things that people want to come and see, but those events take up certain days and times in a calendar. Then there are all the other hundreds of days in the year.
New Orleans has two Fortune 500 companies in the whole state. Many other major cities have many Fortune 500 companies that are headquartered or have regional offices in those cities, and that activity creates individual business travel. We have very limited amounts of that, so meetings and conventions are the foundation. They create the layer that all the other segments are built on top of.
At New Orleans & Company, you lead the team responsible for positioning New Orleans as one of the top convention destinations globally. What does it mean to you to represent New Orleans on such a significant scale?
Being able to sell the city compared to other destinations — because it is absolutely a highly competitive selling environment — being able to do that for New Orleans and Company is an honor for me. We’re very proud of the business that we bring to our community and the small businesses that it employs. The responsibility is never lost on us, but the real honor of being able to sell New Orleans on behalf of our community and for our community is the driving force.
How does your partnership with the convention center work?
The convention center is its own entity, but you will always hear us refer to ourselves as partners. We conceived and created “Built to Host” together.
Whether a big customer is looking at us for a big citywide event or a smaller customer is looking at us for a single-hotel meeting, you will see the way hotels show up and say, “New Orleans first,” and then they’ll compete within that group to get the meeting.
We believe in a New Orleans-first mentality, and we live that out in this community. Then our hotels, our destination management companies, our venues and our restaurants will politely compete. I believe this shared mentality is truly a competitive advantage in how we show up as a community when we’re looking to compete against other destinations.
In 2024, your team booked more than 1,000 meetings that equated to 1.4 million room nights. Can you explain the scale of what your team accomplishes?
We also brought over 1,000 meetings in 2025. This year, we’ll book over 1.5 million room nights into this year and any future year. The American College of Cardiology, for example, will be here in the spring and they will occupy over 10,000 hotel rooms on one night.
If you start thinking about how many hotels it takes to build a complete package for these large meetings, then you start to get a peek into the scale of what we do and why it’s so important, because we’re the only entity that puts the whole package together. We work with our convention center partners on identifying convention center space. Through a coordinated effort — highly coordinated between the convention center, the hotel community and us — we present that bid on behalf of everyone.
What does it take to secure bookings so far in advance, and how do you approach planning for a city’s convention future years in advance?
We go as far as 2040 or beyond. We have become very well-known over the last several decades, especially on the association front. One lesser-known bit of information is how many medical meetings we host here in New Orleans, which is great because think about the science and medicine and breakthroughs that occur within those settings. It’s where commerce happens, where major exhibition companies that are maybe selling to hospitals or doctors are bringing forth new products.
All these exhibitors that are on the convention center floor are then booking private events in our major restaurants. They’re booking our venues, using transportation companies, and booking florists and our cultural bearers. How many times have you seen a second-line parade go down the street? Most of the time, that’s a group, a convention, moving from point A to point B.
New Orleans is the only place that can move people through a second line, and it’s sustainable. We’re helping our high school marching bands; we’re helping our cultural bearers. There’s this whole ecosystem of business that benefits from the business of conventions and meetings.
What do you think attributes to the city’s success when it comes to drawing conventions and meetings?
The destination is incredibly poised — it’s a great backdrop. We’re always in front of clients, selling and keeping New Orleans front of mind. The competition has grown so much from what it was a decade ago. New Orleans is a top 25 market, but the number of new places that we are now competing against makes it challenging for us to ensure that we’re staying on rotation.
Groups are maybe coming someplace every four or five years, so it’s not as it was in the past where they moved between maybe four, five or six destinations. We received an RFP for a small meeting that sourced 43 cities. Technology makes it easy for people to look at more cities.
What’s contributing to this rise in competition?
People in other communities see what’s happening in major cities, and then their city leaders and tourism leaders get together and say, “Well, we want to participate.” For example, major cities are completely knocking down their convention centers and building bigger ones. You see it happening all over the country. Cities continue to grow, adding convention space. It becomes, “Oh wait, we can host that if we add 300,000 square feet to our center. We can add a convention hotel attached to our building.”
What are the biggest challenges you face in this evolving marketplace?
Business has changed since Covid. What people want to get out of their meetings is different. They’re looking at the bigger picture. Not only do you have the dates, the space, the hotels, but they’re looking at: “What can we do in terms of giving back? What can we do from a sustainability standpoint? How can we leave a footprint, both for ourselves and for our attendees?” They want to have an experiential event. Health and wellness are a big part of meetings, and inclusivity is also very important.
The most important thing for us as leaders in our industry is to stay abreast of changes and to bring forward in our own destination what’s beneficial.
Let’s take sustainability as an example. If a group comes and they want to participate in some kind of activity, a small group could participate with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and do a whole host of things. Or maybe they don’t have the bandwidth because they’re meeting is short — well, there are many participating hotels and restaurants with Glass Half Full, where they select glassware, break it down to shard, and make flooring and sandbags.
It’s inherent upon us as the destination sales and marketing organization to bring forward what’s happening in our community in ways that an outside organization can help.
How do you position New Orleans against larger markets with more square footage and newer facilities?
It starts with listening. Every meeting has different needs and requirements. Although at the end of the day it comes down to space availability and how it’s activated. We start with listening, and then we position our destination and bring forward the attributes that are important to them.
That is why we built the brand “Built to Host.” When you think about New Orleans as being Built to Host, you think about all the elements of our culture as active parts of their meeting. How do you activate around food at your major convention banquet? How do you activate around your opening general session to infuse the culture to get folks excited to be there?
We believe that New Orleans is a place of joy, celebration and connectivity. We are very uncommon in our hospitality, and we are told by customers that our level of care and welcoming really goes beyond other places.
“It’s not as it was in the past where they moved between maybe four, five, or size destinations. We received an RFP for a small meeting that sourced 43 cities. Technology makes it easy for people to look at more cities.”
You’ve mentioned that today’s event planners want more than square footage, they want culture, cuisine and character. How does New Orleans deliver on those expectations?
We had a host of influential planners in last year, and we did a debrief with them before they left. One planner said to me, “The most amazing thing about New Orleans is we don’t have to create a theme. We can take New Orleans and activate around it and pull so many parts of its authentic culture.” I think that is the secret sauce. New Orleans creates a cultural celebration, but we’re also a place of innovation. We have so many universities to draw from. So, it’s not just creativity and fun, it’s also innovation.
When you think of the 1,000-plus meetings our sales team brings to the city, we talk a lot about executional excellence and professionalism. That is critically important for an organizer. We want to be fun, but also excellent at executing.
Beyond culture and walkability, what infrastructure improvements have strengthened New Orleans’ competitiveness?
Definitely the new pedestrian park along Convention Center Boulevard, the way that has been turned into something where people can activate outside is one. Then there’s the fact that the convention center is the first LEED Gold-certified building in the city. That’s quite a feat for a building built in the 1980s, and it has since received its second certification. All the work along the riverfront, the transformation of the World Trade Center into the Four Seasons, the opening of the Virgin Hotel, the renovations taking place in our hotel community, all those things make a difference because people then say, “I want to see what’s new in New Orleans.”
The recent Michelin stars have a wonderful impact on our restaurant community. Everyone knows how wonderful our restaurants are. To be a UNESCO Creative City for Music, those outside nods are tremendously important and very exciting.
Why does sustainability matter to meeting planners, and how does LEED Gold certification help you close deals?
Anything to help our environment is critically important around the country. Europe is ahead of the United States on the sustainability front. The convention center has a director of sustainability who travels and looks at best practices around the country. Anytime you can repurpose water, bring the water bottle. Sometimes we get caught up in these big initiatives, but little things make a big difference, like planting a tree to offset a carbon footprint. They changed the lighting in the convention center so it doesn’t burn as much energy. Our park has bioswales that collect water and people can eat outside. These little things add up to make a big difference.
The tourism and hospitality industry employs 70,000 people in metro New Orleans. What is the ripple effect of a single major convention on the local economy?
If a person stays in a hotel, they’re going to spend money on guest rooms and food and beverage in the hotel. Those taxes then flow back to the community. If they need a florist, how many florists here are local? They’re going to have centerpieces at their event. They need music —there are so many local music companies. They need transportation from the convention center to a hotel. They need a place for their banquet. Restaurants really appreciate and count on that business.
It even trickles down into our schools. Many of these groups donate goods and services. We had a musician group that donated bandstands and various things. We had a group here in the spring — the International Dairy Deli Bakery Association — that donated 200,000 pounds of food to Second Harvest.
“Business has changed since Covid. What people want to get out of their meetings is different. They’re looking at the bigger picture.”
What does success look like beyond the room nights and direct spending?
The big thing is that our clients had a successful meeting — that they had great attendance and their attendees had a great experience. We do a lot of association meetings here in New Orleans, and these big annual meetings are the biggest revenue generators for those associations, so having great attendance is critically important. Corporate meetings are an expense, you’re taking your sales team out of the business world, putting them in a meeting and spending money on them. Overall, customer satisfaction is critically important.
What does “Built to Host” mean to you personally, and how do you demonstrate that promise to planners?
It’s in everything we do. Our trade show floors look like Built to Host. It’s all on-brand. We wrote tenets about what Built to Host is about. So, if people say, “Hey, look, sustainability is really important,” well great, we’re built for sustainability. Built to Host is an umbrella that covers everything.
We also do group marketing here under “Built to Host.” We have team members who work with groups, build micro-sites for them, give them access to our photo library to promote the city. We offer a full-service approach under the umbrella in convention sales to set our customers up for as much success as possible.
Looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping the meetings and convention industry over the next 15 to 20 years?
Today’s multi-generational workforce is one of the biggest drivers of how people are reimagining their meetings and conventions. I don’t remember a time when you had so many different generations in the workforce. Harnessing the energy of four different generations so that the meetings industry is flourishing is important for the most important reason: There’s no replacing human connection.
