Multicultural Meetings and Events Will Be Key as Minorities Become the Majority
Photo Credit: The 2016 National Urban League Conference was held in Baltimore. This year, the conference is being hosted in St. Louis, where the local convention & visitors bureau made a concerted effort to bring the meeting to the city. National Urban League / Mark Gail
Skift Take
Bringing more multicultural groups to a destination for meetings and events isn’t just good business. It's also good for local communities and future tourism, too.
With the United States poised to become a minority-majority country by 2040, multicultural markets are no longer a niche outreach business target for convention & visitors bureaus and destination marketing organizations.
Philadelphia is already a minority-majority city, said Greg DeShields, executive director, PHL Diversity, a business development division of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, which works to increase Philadelphia’s share of diverse/multicultural meetings and tourism.
“There are a lot of assets in this market for meeting conference attendees,” he said. “Eighty-one percent of room nights consumed by PHL Diversity-related groups fell in hotel need periods.”
Launched two years ago, PHL Diversity Podcasts strive to “give a good sense of the destination and how leadership influencers have a consistent point of view of Philadelphia being a diverse and welcoming city,” DeShields said. The group recorded 30 podcasts so far this year, in
