Convention Bureau

The Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association has received the prestigious 1995 Gold Service Award from Meetings And Conventions magazine.BACVA won the honor in the convention bureau category, based on a poll of the magazine's readers -- meeting planners nationwide.Selections were based upon overall professionalism and helpfulness of staff; advice on hotels and site inspections; transportation planning assistance; guidance on local attractions and facilities; and liaisons with local vendors and services.

More than 65,200 people attended conventions in Baltimore in the second quarter of the city's fiscal year, utilizing nearly 50,000 hotel rooms and spending $64.2 million, the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association said today. BACVA President and Chief Executive Leslie R. Doggett said in a report released today that 49,581 hotel rooms were rented by the 65,213 people who attended conventions in the region between October and December of last year, the second three months of fiscal year 2004.

The Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors' Association plans to move its headquarters from Constellation Place at Pratt and Light streets (also known as the C&P Building), to the 12th floor of the USF&G tower at 100 Light St. by Nov. 1.Executive Director Wayne Chappell said the organization's 10-year lease at Constellation Place was due to expire in April. He said his office sought bids from other landlords in an effort to take advantage of the depressed downtown real estate market and wound up saving $70,000 a year on rent while gaining more space.

The new leader of Baltimore's convention bureau plans to mix a little romance with culture and the proven appeal of the Inner Harbor to convince more people to come to Baltimore next year and to stay longer. Leslie R. Doggett, president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association, offered an array of strategies yesterday to try to achieve those goals as part of the association's 2004 sales and marketing plan. They include opening a sales office in Washington, selling Baltimore as a "romantic city" this winter, expanding electronic marketing and targeting meeting planners who have historically visited Baltimore during the slow months with a direct-mail campaign.

The Baltimore Convention Bureau wasted no time spreading its good news yesterday, cranking out letters to everyone from the Christian Booksellers Association to the Beer Wholesalers Association of America, proclaiming that the $150 million expansion of the city's Convention Center was on.Monday, when the General Assembly gave its approval to the project after a four-year struggle, was a day for pouring Dom Perignon Champagne, said Wayne Chappell, the Baltimore...

For the second time in two months, an effort to create a new city tax district to raise money to attract conventions and tourists has failed.The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Larry Young, a Baltimore Democrat, would have enabled the city to create an independent authority empowered to collect taxes and other fees from businesses to raise money for the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association.But Mr. Young's measure died yesterday without a vote when the city's Senate delegation decided against acting on it during the delegation's last scheduled meeting of this General Assembly session.

The search for a new chief executive for Baltimore's beleaguered convention bureau has been narrowed to three candidates, and a decision could be announced as early as next week. The organization's search committee received 82 resumes from applicants for the position vacated Feb. 1 by Carroll R. Armstrong, who resigned under pressure after seven years as president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association. "I think we've been able to draw from the best across the country," said Catherine E. Pugh, co-chair of the search committee and a City Council member.

Kathleen Ratcliffe, who has led the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association's far-flung convention marketing efforts for 6 1/2 years, is resigning to become president of the Jacksonville, Fla., convention bureau.Ratcliffe, the Baltimore agency's vice president since her failed bid to become its president 15 months ago, will leave June 30 to take the helm at the Jacksonville and the Beaches Convention & Visitors Bureau.Working with a budget far below that of competitors for most of her tenure in the effort to lure conventions to Baltimore, Ratcliffe nonetheless won accolades here and throughout the convention industry for a work ethic and a knack for selling and for delivering on what she promised from the city.

Hoping to quell a growing storm of protest, Baltimore's convention bureau severed all ties yesterday with its ousted chief executive, whose consulting relationship had been roundly criticized by city and state officials and industry experts. Carroll R. Armstrong, who was forced to resign last month after heading the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association for seven years, will still be paid the $166,753 he would have received as a consultant. The announcement was made last night by Clarence T. Bishop, chairman of the visitors bureau's board of directors.

Baltimore is about to make its spring advertising debut by spending $156,000 on splashy, color advertising in several major publications, including the New Yorker.This is the kickoff of the city's first extended campaign -- 18 months to two years -- targeting the leisure travel market.Beside the New Yorker, the four-page, color inserts will appear in Conde Nast Traveler, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The campaign is the brainchild of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association (BACVA)

Leslie R. Doggett, a senior tourism official in the Clinton administration and an industry veteran, has been picked as the new chief of Baltimore's beleaguered convention bureau, city officials confirmed yesterday. The announcement of Doggett's appointment as president and chief executive officer of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association is expected at a news conference this morning with Mayor Martin O'Malley and other senior city officials. The appointment ends a five-month search for what is seen as a critically important leadership role in the city's lagging effort to build convention and tourism business.

Called by the Baltimore City Council to account for bonuses paid to executives who inflated hotel room bookings, the acting president of the convention bureau said the executives would have received the payments even if the bookings had been recorded accurately. The bonuses - equal to as much as 27 percent of the $173,250 annual pay of at least one of the executives - were based on various factors, only one of which was bookings, said Marshall Murdaugh, interim president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association.

The search for a new chief executive for Baltimore's beleaguered convention bureau has been narrowed to three candidates, and a decision could be announced as early as next week. The organization's search committee received 82 resumes from applicants for the position vacated Feb. 1 by Carroll R. Armstrong, who resigned under pressure after seven years as president and chief executive of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association. "I think we've been able to draw from the best across the country," said Catherine E. Pugh, co-chair of the search committee and a City Council member.

Hoping to quell a growing storm of protest, Baltimore's convention bureau severed all ties yesterday with its ousted chief executive, whose consulting relationship had been roundly criticized by city and state officials and industry experts. Carroll R. Armstrong, who was forced to resign last month after heading the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association for seven years, will still be paid the $166,753 he would have received as a consultant. The announcement was made last night by Clarence T. Bishop, chairman of the visitors bureau's board of directors.

IF I DIDN'T KNOW better -- that Lionel Barrymore has been taking a dirt nap since 1954 and that the character he played in It's A Wonderful Life was obviously fictional -- I'd say Henry Potter was pulling strings and trying to turn this town into the next Pottersville. Godfrey Daniel, what is happening? I feel like I got some bad liquor at Nick's place, or that Sheldon Leonard just gave me a convincer to the jaw. Girls Gone Wild at Bohager's, and 10 of them cited by Bert The Cop for flashing for the cameras.

A high-profile tourism strategist who has headed convention bureaus in New York City, Atlantic City, N.J., and Memphis, Tenn., will oversee an outside evaluation of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association. Marshall Murdaugh, founder of Marshall Murdaugh Marketing in Richmond, Va., has been named as team leader for the Baltimore project by the association's review and evaluation steering committee. His work is to start immediately. "We're excited to have someone of his caliber on our team to help with this important project," said Clarence T. Bishop, chairman of the association's board.

The mayor's recent maneuvers to seize control of Baltimore's XTC convention bureau have prompted influential business leaders at the helm of the bureau since 1982 to take a no-holds-barred stance: Leave us alone or we will quit.And it looks as if Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke will let them go.In the balance is the future of a quasi-public agency that promotes tourism, the city's second-largest industry. The Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association (BACVA) claims credit for helping the city net about $400 million each year from tourists and nearly $9 million in hotel tax receipts.

Alice Virginia Smyrk, 87, a retired office manager with the Baltimore Convention Bureau, died Saturday at the Leader Nursing and Rehabilitation Center II in Norristown, Pa., of heart failure.Graveside services will be held at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Druid Ridge Cemetery at Park Heights Avenue and Old Court Road in Pikesville.The former Alice Clow retired in 1966 after about 10 years at the convention bureau. She worked for city government as a secretary from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s for the agency that built schools and other public buildings.

Baltimore is about to make its spring advertising debut by spending $156,000 on splashy, color advertising in several major publications, including the New Yorker.This is the kickoff of the city's first extended campaign -- 18 months to two years -- targeting the leisure travel market.Beside the New Yorker, the four-page, color inserts will appear in Conde Nast Traveler, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The campaign is the brainchild of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association (BACVA)

Baltimore's convention bureau, which scrimped for years on a fraction of what competitors spent to lure business, says a long-awaited budget increase is paying big dividends -- hundreds of millions of dollars in bookings.But even with $650 million in convention business booked last fiscal year -- a $270 million increase -- bookings still remain far short of projections used to justify the Baltimore Convention Center's publicly financed, $151 million expansion.Leaders of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association attribute the spike in bookings to a spending increase that doubled its budget to $6 million, significantly narrowing the gap between Baltimore and competing cities.