According to hotel-online, Orlando’s honing in on landing The Big Show, otherwise known as the National Association of Home Builders’ the International Builders’ Show, in 2007 and 2008. With over 100,000 attendees at its last outing, you can see why that city is salivating. It’s not too often these days that you hear of anyone wresting a show away from Las Vegas, so I can only imagine all the behind-the-scenes scrambling that went into making this one (almost) happen.

A while back I posted about the brand-spanking-new Marriott in Hartford, Conn., and its fight to not have to bring its ADA-compliant rooms up to Connecticut code, which is stricter. Today I hear from hotel-online this:

Fifteen handicapped accessible bathrooms at the soon-to-open Marriott Hartford Downtown have been demolished and plans are underway to make them easier for guests in wheelchairs to use, state officials said last week.

“We’re pushing hard,” said Mark Wolman, an executive with the developer, Waterford Group LLC, who added that the hotel will open in August. “We will be done for the opening.”

The Publicity Hound, who thoughtfully always includes a dog joke at the end of her weekly e-newsletter, has an interesting post about whether or not the press release is dead.

Well, it may not be dead, but I’d say it’s on life support in all too many cases. Probably 97 percent of the releases I get are irrelevant, contain no news, are so poorly written that they’re not worth trying to parse out, etc. , etc., that they go directly into the circular file (physical or electronic—same problems, just different delivery systems). I can’t help but wonder how many good ones get thrown away with the heaping mass? Even more annoying are the PR people who call to say, “Did you get my press release?” Unless it was in that 3 percent, I’m not going to remember. The other 97 percent gets treated with all the TLC of spam, which it pretty much is. How many more trees must die before we stop this insanity?!

If you want to get the attention of anyone–say, the local newspaper that could give your meeting a great publicity boost–listen to Anil Dash’s most excellent rant, and use this as an example of what not to do (Anil’s talking about pitching bloggers specifically, but it holds pretty true for the rest of the world, too).

Make it relevant, make it interesting, and tell me why I specifically should care. If you can’t, don’t send it. Thanks.

The city may not have big ad budgets and monster PR machines, but it does have regular citizens who like to talk about the town. Like Erin Leffelman, who writes a blog about what to do in the great Milwaukee outdoors on her Play in the City blog. This is so smart–a real-live person talking about things she likes to do in the place she lives. My apologies to PR folks everywhere, but this trumps a press release anyday in both the fun-to-read and believability factors. And, according to The Publicity Hound, Milwaukee plans to add another citizen blogger to the campaign, this time talking about the arts and cultural offerings.

It’s fun, it’s informative, it’s free (for the CVB), and, most importantly, it’s an uncensored view of one little corner of the world. Hey, I wonder if the Groton Chamber of Commerce would like someone blogging about the hiking trails in town–my dogs and I have cruised pretty much all of them.

The International Association for Exhibition Management has signed a deal with FuelDog to work on putting together a blog for its Expo Expo show in November. Cool–can’t wait to read it when it starts up in September!

According to hotel_online, the World Travel & Tourism Council Crisis Committee has looked into what impact last Thursday’s terrorist action in London would have on travel and tourism, and it looks to be fairly minimal. For this, we are all thankful. I doubt too many meeting planners will hear objections about having London as a destination, though they might, as one MIMlister noted this morning, have to rent shuttles for the public transportation-leary.

According to this article on msnbc, Baltimore is looking at a somewhat bleak ‘06 when it comes to citywide conventions. As the headline–Hotels slashing prices to make up for lost ‘06 conventions– suggests, there may be deals to be had:

A slowdown in citywide conventions in 2006 is putting pressure on downtown Baltimore hotel executives to court smaller groups more aggressively, with many planning to slash hotel rates, offer room upgrades and other incentives.

As of early July, meeting planners booked 155,400 room nights for citywide conventions in calendar year 2006, which is nearly one-third fewer than those booked in 2004 and 38 percent fewer than what is projected for 2005, according to the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association (BACVA).

While of course hoteliers say they’ll be pricing on a case-by-case basis, it sounds like everyone’s anticipating a buyer’s market holdover for at least a year in that city.

If you’re looking to goof off for a minute or two, try playing cursor-keep-away with this crazy rabbit. I don’t know why I found this site so amusing, but I did.

Thanks to Jim Spellos of Meeting U for the pointer!