Nashville suffered more than $1.9 billion in damage to more than 11,000 privately owned structures in the wake of flooding earlier this month. Among the most well-known of those damaged structures is the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, which is unlikely to reopen before mid-fall. The temporary closure of Tennessee’s largest hotel and one its most popular convention sites is a heavy blow to the city’s tourism industry and to its economy. Nashville’s loss, however, could prove to be beneficial to Chattanooga, Memphis and Knoxville.
Convention officials in each of those cities are working quietly to bring meetings, conferences and trade shows displaced by the flooding and its aftermath to their communities. The efforts are properly low-key, more an offer to help a sister city in distress than to work aggressively against it. “We’re offering assistance as much as we can. We’d like to keep groups in Tennessee,” said Steve Genovesi, sales and marketing director of the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau.
That’s the sentiment elsewhere as well. A Knoxville tourism official said, “We wanted to be compassionate of their [Nashville’s] grief, but knew those conventions would need a place so we wanted to get Knoxville’s information in front of them just like Memphis and Chattanooga are doing.” That outreach has produced varying but generally positive results that should help keep tourist dollars in the state.
One fairly large group unable to meet in Nashville was “very interested” in coming to Chattanooga instead, Mr. Genovesi said. It was unable to do so because the there was “no availability at the convention center or at hotels on its meeting date.” Other contacts, though, have proved more fruitful.
Some Chattanooga hotel managers confirm that they already have booked several meetings and conferences unable to meet in Nashville. It’s likely that number will grow in coming weeks. Continued inquiries from planners scheduling and finalizing small and mid-size meetings later this year strongly suggest that will be the case.
Memphis and Knoxville tourism and convention officials report similar success. Each has booked at least one convention in the last couple of weeks and officials– like those here — continue to make it known within the industry that their cities and facilities are available as needed. That’s a proper approach. It maintains agency integrity in an atmosphere free of the adversarial aspect that often marks the highly competitive convention and tourism businesses in more normal circumstances.
Nashville’s tourism and convention business eventually will return to normal. Indeed, a “Nashville Is Open” public relations campaign already is underway to announce that much of the city’s tourism infrastructure is intact and that the community is ready to welcome visitors. That’s true in the main, but the fact is that the city’s convention business will continue to take a hit until the Opryland Resort & Convention Center reopens.
Given that, it’s not unseemly for Chattanooga, Memphis and Knoxville to attempt to fulfill a need that Nashville, for the moment, is unable to meet.