Popular US meeting venues impacted by natural and unnatural disasters

.Wild weather that included intense flooding, the aftermath of an oil spill, and a thwarted terrorist attack combined to curtail activities at familiar sites known for their popular meeting markets.
 

The moral: “The situations prove to meeting planners the need to expect the unexpected, and have contingency plans in place for every meeting,” suggested Meetings Net.
 

One of the biggest casualties was the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, the largest hotel in Nashville. Guests were evacuated last weekend due to unprecedented rains and flooding in the area, according to the hotel’s website. It may be months before it is reopened, according to the Tennessean newspaper. Other hotels in the surrounding Music Valley sustained flood damage and have closed, some for several weeks or even months.
 

But the oil spill in the Mississippi Gulf Coast region may lead to even more damage to the meetings and tourism market not only there but also in Florida and possibly other areas, CVB officials reported.
 

Said Kelly Schulz, vice president, communications and public relations, Mississippi CVB:
 

“This is unfamiliar territory for the Gulf Coast region because the leak has not yet been contained.”
 

As the Gulf Coast braces for a sprawling slick from a damaged oil well to hit its shores, the financial impact is already seeping into the region’s $100 billion-plus tourism industry.
 

"This has the potential to be as big an economic disaster as an environmental one," particularly since summer is high season for most of the region’s beach towns, says tourism marketer Peter Yesawich.
 

Florida’s panhandle area, known for its fishing and sugary-white beaches, was particularly concerned because tourists have already called to cancel planned vacations as news of the potential oil slick spread.
 

But the worst case scenario for Florida’s $65 billion a year tourism business is that the spill could go beyond the Gulf Coast beaches. If the oil gets caught up in the “loop” current that encircles the state, it would wind up spreading to Florida’s other coast, into the Atlantic Ocean in South Florida.
 

“If your tourism and your beaches are not only threatened on the Gulf Coast, but then are threatened on the southwest coast, then you just have major economic disaster,” said US Senator Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
 

A threatened unnatural disaster, terrorism, led to at least one hotel having to be evacuated in New York. After a car bomb was found in a deserted car in Times Square last weekend, which is Manhattan’s busiest tourist area and the heart of the theater district, some of the rooms at the Marriott Marquis were evacuated, according to USA Today.
 

The rudimentary makings for a bomb were deactivated before harm could be done. Federal officers arrested 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American at John F. Kennedy International Airport earlier this week when he tried to leave for Dubai.
 

In Arizona, meetings have been getting support from hospitality industry leaders. These include the US Travel Association, which has called for an end to the convention boycott called in response to a new controversial immigration law.
 

Several more meetings have reportedly been canceled in Arizona, and the man behind the boycott, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., has not softened his stance.
 

"We call for an end to counterproductive Arizona travel boycotts,” said Roger Dow, president and CEO at US Travel, in a press release. He added:
 

“This complex issue should be resolved on the merits of various proposals, not by holding an industry and its 300,000 employees hostage to politics.”
 

By David Wilkening