Hold off on Big Easy visit
Karen Wall had planned to celebrate her birthday in New Orleans later this month. Instead, she and her husband are heading to Orlando, Fla.
There they’ll dine at Emeril’s Orlando – owned by celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, who has three restaurants in New Orleans – “as a small concession to having to miss all of the wonderful dining in New Orleans.”
Wall, of Tustin, Calif., is among tens of thousands of travelers whose plans to visit New Orleans were disrupted by Hurricane Katrina. Tourism officials are asking leisure travelers to wait until the end of the year before returning, and those forced to find alternative destinations range from brides planning dream weddings to conventions of 20,000 people.
Some, like Wall, will settle for a little piece of the New Orleans experience elsewhere – whether it’s dining on Cajun food far from Louisiana, or listening to music on Beale Street in Memphis instead of Bourbon Street.
“Vegas is going to pick up, too,” predicted Roger Dow, president of the Travel Industry Association of America. “If you want to party, everything’s there – restaurants, gaming.”
Those looking for Southern charm and historic homes will head to places like Charleston, S.C., where the visitors center recorded 4,000 more walk-ins this September than last.
“It appears we do have visitors who would have gone to New Orleans,” said Frank Fredericks of the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.
New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center – which was trashed by evacuees who found refuge there from their flooded neighborhoods – is closed for renovations until March 31. But only a few cities in the country – Chicago, Atlanta, Orlando and Las Vegas – have comparable facilities of more than 1 million square feet of exhibit space. So those cities are getting large trade shows and meetings that had been planned for New Orleans.
Altogether, New Orleans will lose $3.5 billion in revenue from meetings that are held elsewhere, according to J. Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Some recipients of this unexpected windfall in convention business plan to give something back. Chicago hotels have agreed to donate $10 per room, per night, to the recovery of New Orleans’ hospitality industry for any business booked at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Complex as a result of Katrina.
And a popular music event, the Voodoo Music Fest, was moved from New Orleans to Memphis, where it will be held Oct. 29 and 30 as a benefit for recovery effort.
Two-thirds of New Orleans was subject to flooding that will likely force the demolition of most homes. But historic structures, buildings and gardens in the French Quarter – its main tourism district – survived Katrina with little damage.
Nevertheless, officials are asking leisure travelers to postpone their trips for now.
“We just want to make sure that everything is right as people come back,” Perry said from Baton Rouge, where the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau has temporary offices. “You want them to have the full New Orleans experience.”
Although 80 percent of New Orleans’ 38,000 hotel rooms will be restored by the end of October, he said, insurance adjusters, engineers and other recovery workers “are literally buying up every room in the city for the next 60 to 90 days.” In addition, most hotels are reserving 15 to 25 percent of rooms for hotel workers whose homes were destroyed.
But by year’s end, recovery workers will be leaving, more restaurants and clubs will be open, and 95 percent of downtown hotels are expected to be “renovated to the standards they had before the storm,” Perry said.
He said visiting at Christmastime “is a real possibility” and also encouraged tourists to return for a scaled-down Mardi Gras on Feb. 28.
“It will be one of the most enjoyable and joyous in history,” said Perry.
Major floats used in Mardi Gras parades survived intact, he said, and repairs will be carefully done to maintain the architectural integrity of historic areas.
“New Orleans will look every bit as authentic and real as it ever did, but spruced up,” he said. “There will be no Disneyland in New Orleans.”
The city’s fans are already planning future visits.
Tara McKendry of Park Falls, Wis., rescheduled her Nov. 3 wedding from New Orleans to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
“But my fiancé and I have promised each other that we will go to New Orleans for our one-year wedding anniversary,” said McKendry, one of many travelers expressing support for the city on the TripAdvisor.com Web site.
The American Society of Hematology moved its meeting of 20,000 people from New Orleans on Dec. 3 to Atlanta on Dec. 10.
The organization’s president, Dr. James George, asked his members to save the meeting’s original brochure “with its lovely cover scene of the Mississippi riverboat, to remind you of what our meeting in New Orleans could have been, and what it will be when ASH returns to New Orleans in the future.”