Skift Take
The St. Louis and Baltimore tourism bureaus used digital content wisely to protect their visitor economies during social unrest. Now they're attempting to use those same advocacy skills to help rebuild and strengthen their local communities to varying degrees of success.
Outside of natural disasters, few things scare U.S. tourism bureau CEOs more than SWAT teams atop military trucks firing tear gas at large crowds in their cities.
That goes double for meeting planners with conventions scheduled in those cities.
The violent protests in the Ferguson suburb of St. Louis in August 2014 and Baltimore in April 2015 had negative short-term impacts on convention business in both destinations. As soon as the news broke of unrest in each city, meeting planners with pending events began calling their contracted hotels to find out more information, but the hotel executives themselves weren't always sure how to answer their clients.
Explore St. Louis and Visit Baltimore — the convention and visitors bureaus that promote their cities to the meetings industry — helped stabilize their communities by being trusted sources for accurate information amid all of the confusion. How they managed public outreach during and after the uprisings provides illuminating case studies for destination marketing and crisis management in 2015.
However, perhaps much more importantly over the long term, the tourism bureaus are participating in collaborative civic platforms designed to build stronger communities by connecting people across all economic classes.
Potentially, especially in St. Louis, those community portals could become models for other cities with disadvantaged neighborhoods across America.
Moving St. Louis Forward
Ferguson, Missouri is located just east of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport well north of the downtown core, but the volatility of the August 2014 protests swept the entire city into the national spotlight.
“There was all of this media attention focused on a 3-block area in a suburban community, but it often appeared as though the entire region was under siege,” says Kitty Ratcliffe, president of Explore St. Louis. “It was critical for us to provide information about the situation to people, including those who had meetings and events scheduled in St. L
