It’s a huge deal to host the Professional Convention Management Association’s annual meeting.
San Diego got the nod to welcome the 4,000-plus attendees of PMCA’s “Convening Leaders” event to the downtown San Diego Convention Center from January 7-10, 2024.
Local tourism authorities have gone all out. There’s an opening reception at SeaWorld. PCMA has scheduled power couple President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton to present a joint address in a general session. Veteran R&B harmonizers Boyz II Men will put on a special show at the world-class outdoor music venue Rady Shell at Jacobs Park.
What’s the big deal? Some medical conventions bring 35,000 visitors to town. Comic-Con attracts roughly 130,000. Why are tourism officials pre-gaming PCMA like the NFL’s Lombardi Trophy is at stake?
“PCMA is the Super Bowl of meetings-industry events,” says Rip Rippetoe, president and CEO of the San Diego Convention Center Corporation. “Overall, it represents billions of dollars of potential business meeting revenue.”
Rippetoe has a long-standing connection to PCMA. During the meeting he’ll join the association’s board of directors and trustees for a two-year term.
PCMA’s superpower is that more than half of registered attendees are meeting and convention planners for other associations and corporations. That means Convening Leaders is an opportunity to show roughly 2,000 potential clients why San Diego is the place to book their next meeting.
You could say PCMA’s Convening Leaders is akin to the most popular kid in school. Everybody wants it to come sit at their cafeteria lunch table.
“Cities all over the country are tripping over themselves to get PCMA,” says MeetingsNet senior content producer Rob Carey, a 32-year industry veteran who’s been to 15 PCMAs. “Attendees are potential buyers.”
Carey says if just one attendee likes what they see and books a four-day meeting for 300 people, that one deal could potentially bring an overall economic impact of up to half a million dollars to hotels, restaurants and the local economy.
PCMA is definitely a chance to invest in an opportunity that can be a major boost to the local economy, says San Diego Tourism Authority president and CEO Julie Coker.
She quantifies the expected return on investment by saying PCMA should directly lead to her sales team securing contracts for 500,000 future hotel room nights. That could equate to bookings representing tens of millions of dollars.
The prediction is based on history. San Diego hosted PCMA in 2012. (Coker attended the meeting; at the time she was president and CEO of the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau.) She says research shows that PCMA 2012 in San Diego led to 300,000 room-night bookings.
“We track meetings our sales team had, as well as business we closed on the spot and business that came from meetings at the time,” Coker says.
The Professional Convention Management Association was founded in 1956 and is currently based in Chicago. PCMA has more than 7,000 members in more than 40 countries, with 17 chapters in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
PCMA is one of three major meetings-industry events that can bring big business to cities. The other two are Meeting Planners International (MPI) and the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE).
There are other similar annual events. One industry gathering that’s become a “must-attend” over the last decade is IMEX America (which meets annually in Las Vegas).
PCMA shuffles its meetings around the United States. It has already selected annual meeting sites for the next three years: Houston (2025), Philadelphia (2026) and Miami (2027).
Held each January, Convening Leaders literally leads off the meetings-industry calendar.
“It’s our flagship educational meeting and we like to set the tone and show off the trends for the coming year,” says PCMA chief of staff and VP of corporate communications Meghan Risch.
Education in the meetings industry is even more vital post-COVID, she says.
“COVID happened ‘to’ us and it happened ‘for’ us,” Risch says. “It caught us off guard. We have to be prepared so something like that can’t catch us off guard again.”
In San Diego, Convening Leaders will include roughly three dozen breakout sessions aimed at meeting planner education. Glitch-free virtual meetings are a hot topic. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are front-and-center issues. So is environmentalism and sustainability.
So yes, while meeting planners are learning how to be better at their jobs at PCMA’s annual meeting, destination representatives from all over are on hand to tout their cities’ meeting facilities. And the host city gets the best chance to play show and tell.
“A lot has changed since PCMA was here in San Diego in 2012,” SDTA’s Coker says. “There are a lot of infrastructure changes to see. Space, dates and rates matter to planners. But seeing the landscape of the destination matters a lot.”
It’s like having home-field advantage at the Super Bowl. SDSun
