This writeup in the New Orleans CityBusiness talks about how the American Library Association convention in NOLA went off pretty well. All in all, the writeup is pretty positive, though I think I’m still with the 33 percent of people in our recent poll who would need a lot a assurances about safety and security before bringing a citywide to New Orleans, much as I love that town. Particularly now that the murder and crime rate are on the rise again. Then again, it’s still well below what it used to be, so hush my mouth:

New Orleans is now averaging six armed robberies per week compared with 63 pre-Katrina and 8.9 murders per 100,000 people compared with 54.6 in 2004.

That may be, but what about the roving gang of transvestite desperados ripping off armloads of frippery on Magazine Street? (Click through to the article—it’s a great read.)

Anyway, we’ll have to wait and see how the city continues to handle its larger meetings and citywides, and how many organizations have attendees as adventurous as those librarians (I love librarians!). As UNLV hospitality professor Patti Shock says in the article above:

You might be able to bring the meeting planner down there and do a site inspection and convince them all is well but you can’t do that for every single attendee.

“If a meeting planner books, but instead of getting 1,000 people to come they only get 500, that’s a big hit for them and a big risk. Most people are going to hold off and wait and see.”

If I were a bellman, I’d seriously consider moving to New Orleans, where bell wages post-Katrina have risen 95 percent, according to a a survey Wagewatch conducted for a group of New Orleans hotels (of course, I have no idea what they got paid pre-Katrina in New Orleans, so this might not be such a great deal; just a better deal than it used to be).

While bellmen are seeing the largest increases, wages also are on the rise for everyone from housekeeping to front desk people. That’s because there’s still a huge shortage of hospitality industry workers in New Orleans, and the city needs to attract folks so it can get its convention and tourism business going again. According to Wagewatch, room attendant and housekeeping wages increased 29 percent, and front desk and night auditor wages were up 22 and 21 percent, respectively.

When it’s coming from meetings displaced from New Orleans, it is, according to this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Mark Vaughan doesn’t normally try to talk convention planners out of bringing their business to Atlanta, but that’s exactly what he’s been doing lately with groups committed to holding meetings in rival New Orleans.

Atlanta has gotten a boost from the 10 conventions with about 122,000 attendees that will relocate here over the next two years because of Hurricane Katrina. Yet when groups approach Vaughan and other Atlanta officials about moving a show, the first thing they do is encourage organizers to keep the event in New Orleans.

“We tell them we would prefer they respect their contract and honor their agreement with New Orleans,” said Vaughan, executive vice president of sales and marketing for the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, an agency that recruits meetings to Georgia’s capital. “We are trying to be a good neighbor.”

Atlanta also is a partner with New Orleans in promoting the region, along with Nashville. While I applaud the sentiment, if the meeting is leaving NOLA no matter what, it makes sense for another Southern city to pick it up and keep the region humming. I’m hoping for the best when conventions start heading back to the Big Easy this spring, but I still have reservations on how prepared the city will be to handle a large convention. I hope I’m wrong.

P.S. Here’s an interesting article on measuring the cost of hotel interruption from Katrina, from hotel-online.

The Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans is reopening for business on November 1, having sustained little damage from hurricane Katrina, according to a letter sent to ICPA members. These primarily being insurance and financial services meeting professionals, the letter asks them “to consider booking us for any of your catastrophe team personnel who have accommodations needs over the next several months, for your individual executive travel or for any potential meetings and or incentive programs.”

This just in on Gulf Coast hotels post-Katrina: From Smith Travel Research, Hurricane Katrina’s Impact on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans Hotel Industry.

As of October 10th there were 465 hotels with 43,915 rooms open to the public and emergency personnel in the affected areas. The open rooms account for roughly 54% of the hotel inventory available prior to Katrina. Mark Lomanno, president of STR, commented: “While it is encouraging to see that almost 44,000 rooms in the area weathered the storm, the impact of Katrina on the greater New Orleans hotel market and throughout the region will be felt for years to come.”

I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise.

Uh oh, here come the insurance battles I’ve been waiting for and hoping wouldn’t materialize. The first salvo, according to hotel-online:

Las Vegas-based Pinnacle Entertainment on Friday became the first gaming operator to reopen a hurricane damaged casino in New Orleans, but a dispute with its primary insurance carrier could affect redevelopment plans for the company’s destroyed casino in Biloxi, Miss.

Pinnacle, which had three of the company’s eight casinos closed because of Gulf Coast hurricanes over the past month, said its primary insurance carrier believes damage at the Casino Magic in Biloxi caused by Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29 was the result of flooding rather than a weather catastrophe. The company, Westport Indemnity Corp., plans to limit payments as a result.

It sounds as if the Hyatt Regency New Orleans fate is still unclear, according to an article in hotel-online. Its owner is trying to work up a public-private partnership, and it sounds like the city’s mayor is somewhat behind that happening. From the article:

Strategic Hotel Capital has not made a final decision yet on whether to restore and reopen the hotel.

“We will watch and see if the local, state and federal governments can get their act together, and how money will be dispersed and when,” [Laurence Geller, head of Strategic Hotel Capital Inc., which owns the hotel] said.

To date, he says he hasn’t seen effective coordination, and this worries him. “I’m terrified when there are three monolithic government agencies that have to talk to each other,” he said.

Meanwhile, the J.W. Marriott in New Orleans has reopened for business as of last Friday.

For Hurricane Rita watchers: A good combination of Google maps and hurricane-tracking data is here.

The Houston Channel 11 news station is running a continuously updated blog on what’s happening in the city. Houston MetBlogs also is running first-person commentary related to Rita.

Hang in there, folks. Our thoughts are with you as we all wait to see where and how Rita plays out. At least it sounds like most people evacuated this time.

While Katrina was devastating in so many ways, it sounds, from this Smith Travel Research Report, like it’s not going to have too bad an effect on the hospitality industry:

Smith TravelResearch…today increased its 2005 RevPAR growth projection for the total US from 7.6% up to 8.2%. ‘Despite the obvious attrition from displaced business, the increase in Katrina related emergency travel combined with the relocated meetings demand to other cities will have a meaningful impact on occupancies,’ stated Randy Smith, CEO and founder of STR.

Added Mark Lomanno, president of STR: ‘Some of our client hotels, despite being closed to the public, house FEMA workers, evacuees and clean-up crews and keep reporting revenues and occupancies to us. We conservatively estimate occupancies in hotels that were not closed due to this disaster to be substantially above average for the rest of the year. Nationally, the decrease in room supply due to Katrina’s impact coupled with the already strong overall hotel demand allows us to revise our 2005 year-end estimates upward.’

It also projects average daily rates to be up 5 percent, and RevPar up more than 8 percent.

According to Tuesday’s Houston Chronicle, the Texas Association of School Boards and Texas Association of School Administrators have decided to postpone their convention in the city this weekend until later in the year due to Rita’s untimely expected arrival. I feel for the hoteliers in the area, who are still housing Katrina evacuees (the article says 35 percent of the city’s hotel rooms are being used by these folks) as they brace for a wave of hometown people looking for refuge.

The loss of those 11,000 attendees could mean more hotel rooms will be available for shelter, but there’s always the possibility that the hotels will have to shut down. I just saw that Rita’s winds are now up to 170 mph. Unbelievable.