Houston and the battle for minority tourism

As the curtain falls tonight on the 2006 Essence Music Festival, marking the end of the event's first year away from New Orleans, organizers expect other cities to start trying to make sure it never goes back. The three-day festival is a potential windfall for convention and tourism bureaus: It draws thousands of visitors and their wallets, and it could help position a city as a minority tourist destination. At least that's what Houston hopes.

According to the Travel Industry Association of America, minority travelers spent about $90 billion on domestic travel in 2002, the most recent year for which figures were available. To help Houston get its share of that money, the city hired a dedicated staff member nearly 20 years ago to cater to the minority market, and it seems to have worked: As the Chronicle notes, Houston has hosted the Super Bowl, the NBA All-Star Game and a variety of large black conventions in the last two and a half years. The one-man minority tourism staff has grown to five, and it has its sights on making the Essence festival a permanent feature here. "We're doing our level best to get multiple years," Ken Middleton, vice president of convention sales for the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, said.

There aren't many U.S. cities that have the facilities needed to host an event like the EMF, including 25,000 available hotel rooms and a 50,000-plus-seat indoor arena. Atlanta, Indianapolis and Detroit do, and festival planners expect them to go after the event, too. How things went this weekend will not only go a long way toward whether the Essence festival comes back to Houston, but also whether other minority events head our way, too. "Houston has not had the reputation for African-American business as cities such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Baltimore, D.C., Detroit and Chicago," Richard Lee Snow, chairman of the National Coalition of Black Meeting Planners, told the Chronicle. "Within our industry, the best form of marketing and sales is word of mouth," Snow said. "People will hear about what is good and what is bad quickly."