AMERICA THE EXCEPTIONAL - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 271

and meetings of groups from the United States in various European countries. He lives
in Chicago and travels throughout the country drumming up business. He laughed at the
idea that European countries are in competition with Las Vegas or Chicago with their
enormous convention centers and hotels.
“Europe doesn't have such large hotels with rooms for all of the delegates and conferen-
ce space. That's not what we offer. I don't see myself taking away meetings from American
cities,” he said in a telephone interview. “By the time an organization calls us, they know
they want to have a meeting in Europe and we help figure out where.”
An annual meeting in Rome with a weekend jaunt to the Mediterranean coast might
sound more appealing than another trip to New York. With 1.8 million conventions, meet-
ings, trade shows and exhibitions held in the United States every year, Europeans and Asi-
ans are making bids for the business.
What is a business conference to one person is a junket to another. Besides concerns
about spending during a recession, the MICE slice of travel is routinely hit by revelations
of lavish spending by adults who seem to be having too much fun on a so-called business
trip. In 2012 the General Services Administration offered a prime example.
The GSA hosted a four-day training conference in Las Vegas in 2010 at the four-star M
Resort Spa Casino that cost $823,000, nearly three times its original budget, and included
extravagances such as a $75,000 “team-building exercise” to build bicycles together. The
organizers paid $44 a person for breakfast and $94 each for dinner—all taxpayer money at
a time when the country was barely climbing out of recession. Congress was not amused
when the trip was exposed two years later, and imposed new restrictions on government
meetings.
Incentive travel—the I in MICE—also nearly disappeared in the wake of scandalous
excess when the American International Group took its executives on a lavish trip in
September 2008, just days after receiving an $85 billion bailout from the government. The
practice returned in a subdued form with the economic recovery. Employees and execut-
ives are more likely to travel within the United States and stay at four-star, not five-star,
hotels.
The most surprising facet of the appeal of Las Vegas is its insistence that good labor
relations is part of its hospitality—what the mayor and nearly every other official told me
during my stay in the city. Emanuel had blamed the unions for Chicago's decline in the
convention business, but Las Vegas has stronger union labor than Chicago.
Meyer of the Convention Authority said that by signing a five-year union contract, Steve
Wynn set the standard for solid management-labor relations. “Labor knows what's going
on in the hotels. All of our major brands are based here—Caesar's, MGM, Wynn—it is
still the case that labor unions work well in Las Vegas and that management values the
training and engagement of union workers.”