Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348155
B M & T ••• May/June 2014 ••• www.blackmeetingsandtourism.com 16 Ernest (Ernie) Wooden, Jr., a long-time senior hos- pitality industry executive and Los Angeles- area resident since 1999, was been named president and CEO of the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board (LA Tourism), in January of 2013 Wooden has spent his entire career in the hospitality industry, including more than a decade in senior leadership positions in both global brand management and operations with Hilton Hotels Corporation. As executive vice president, Global Brand Management for Hilton, based in Beverly Hills, CA, he led all worldwide branding initiatives for the well-known hotel corpora- tion, working with 3,000 properties in 80 countries. His operations roles at Hilton included overseeing territories in Mexico, the Caribbean and across the U.S. Recently, Wooden spoke to Black Meetings & Tourism about his work at Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board and the developments taking place in the LA area. Q: What is the role of LA Tourism? A: The work of LA Tourism is broad in the city. Primarily we are responsible for engaging tourists to come to the city. Last year brought in and counted about 42 million tourists that came into Los Angeles, and we set a north star goal of getting to 50 mil- lion by 2020.. So one of main concerns is bringing tourists into the city. Another part of our job is to go out and find conventions that will come to Los Angeles and use our convention center. We have offices in about six or seven locations throughout the United States, and those offices are populated by people who do nothing but go out after associations, corporate business, pharmaceuti- cals, whatever that might be. The third thing we do is that we represent about 150 hotels, specifically in the small meetings market. And by that I mean we have a team of people, four of which are local, and half a dozen that are national, that go after self- contained meetings. These are not con- ventions or meetings that can go into the Convention Center, but these are meetings that would be self-contained in our hotels. Another part of our responsibility is route development for Los Angeles World Airports. And in that role we have about 10 offices around the world where they talk primarily to airlines and trade maga- zines to attract people to come into LA. In that role we try to identify nonstop flights into LA. There are about 60 foreign desti- nations that come into Los Angeles Airport. You might ask why that's impor- tant. It's because our economists both internally and externally, have measured that for every flight we have that comes into LA represents about 650 million dol- lars of economic impact. Every time we bring in one new flight it has significant impact on our economy, on our jobs, on taxes, etc. And then in addition to that we have international offices where we go after international conventions, M.I.C.E. business and things like that. We are in Seoul, Korea. We have two offices in China. I opened a new one recently in Shanghai, but we've been in Beijing for over seven years. We are in Sydney, Australia. We have rep- resentation, of course, that covers Mexico here in Los Angeles, and Canada. And then we have offices in London, England that covers Western Europe and the Middle East. Q: You say you have set a goal of 50 million visitors by 2020. What would be the economic impact of such an increase? A:It didn't take long for me after I came to the Bureau here to see what the heavy economic movers were. Tourism, in fact, is one of the heaviest economic movers for the city and the county. And I learned that those 42 million people that were here last year spent directly on our hotels, our restaurants, taxi cabs and others, 16.5 billion dollars in one year. The economists tell me that in order to understand the full economic impact, you've got to multiply that direct spend by an econometric fac- tor of about two. Which says that those 42 million people spent 32 billion dollars on our economy. And so, the question was, how do we get that number up? And how do we get that sig- nificantly and quickly? I challenged our internal organization and some consultants and I said what "What would it take for us to get to 50 million tourists n Los Angeles? And will that be organic and can we do that by 2020? The short answer was no, there's no way we can get to 50 million organically by 2020. But if the city really got serious about its tourism assets, we could turbo charge, if you will, provide more octane, to get us to 50 million by 2020. So my next question was, if we got to 50 million, what does that look like? What do the numbers look like. Well, one of the A CONVERSATION WITH ERNEST WOODEN,JR. PART I Q & A BY SOLOMON J. HERBERT