CVB Taps Longtime MPI Exec DuBois

After nearly three decades in the hospitality and meetings industries, David DuBois in January made the switch and joined the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau as president and CEO, the first CVB position on his résumé. Prior to the move, DuBois—a former CEO of the Professional Convention Management Association and a longtime hotel executive—most recently served as executive vice president of the Meeting Professionals International Foundation.

"I had the opportunity presented to me by Mike Gamble, who runs SearchWide. He wanted to present me as a candidate," DuBois said. "He knew my background, which is a combination of sales, marketing, organizational management and certainly hotel operations. I understand the hospitality, meetings, travel and tourism industry pretty well by working on both sides of it: the association side and the supplier/hotelier side. He described what the search committee was looking for and it was somebody with my skill set but with a real emphasis on meetings, conventions, sales and marketing."

DuBois said he sees the new role as a natural fit for the skills he learned in the meetings business.

"We have a board of directors, an executive committee and three or four committees. If you were to take 'Fort Worth CVB' off the title and have it be a described organization on paper, you would think it is what it is. It's an organization. It's an association. My association management skills, with running committees and strategic planning and budgeting, all played well with this opportunity. Then certainly my hospitality industry sales and marketing skills played well, as well," he said.

DuBois' background in the corporate meetings industry should serve him well in the coming years, as the Fort Worth CVB is looking to bring more corporate business into town.

"We are very focused and aggressive, and we're trying to get more budget money to hire more salespeople to bring more meetings and conventions to town. They don't know what's about to come at them, because we have historically been more of an association, religious, government and sports type of city. We have not been as aggressive and assertive as we are and will continue to be in the corporate meetings market, mostly because we did not have a hotel package that would be attractive enough with our convention center to be a magnet for corporate meetings," he said.

In order to produce a more marketable convention center package, the city is building or renovating approximately 2,000 rooms that will be within walking distance of the Fort Worth Convention Center, including an Embassy Suites, a Sheraton, a Hilton and an Omni. By the end of 2008, approximately 1,200 new rooms will be in place.

"The sobering reality and the challenge we have as a convention bureau—and I say sobering reality in a very positive way—is that we are doubling our downtown hotel room inventory, thus we have to double the number of meetings and conventions and trade shows that we bring to this town and start to realize their economic impact as of January 2009," he said.

In preparing for his new role, DuBois decided to go to the existing hotels in the community to spread the word about the city's new plan.

"My first 10 weeks I stayed in 12 or 13 hotels for one, two or three nights each and met with the general managers and directors of sales to share our vision for what's happening in this community. It was a great product trial," he said.

Fort Worth might be the smaller of its international airport's namesake cities, but DuBois said the atmosphere between it and Dallas is more of camaraderie than competition.

"We collaborate with them. I want Dallas to be highly successful in their solicitation efforts for meetings, conventions and trade shows and get people from Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver—from wherever these organizations are located—and convince them to come to Dallas and to this area. We're selling each other and we're sharing leads. We want to bring more business to the region," he said.

While DuBois recognizes the advantages of collaborating regionally, he sees his business now as being all about collaborating and providing resources for people seeking business and meetings venues.

"CVB services are free of charge to meeting planners, whether they're corporate, independent, association, religious or government," he said. "All the different planner communities that are out there should rely on convention and visitors bureaus to facilitate their site inspections, to facilitate their requests for proposals, to check availability, to be a neutral source for identifying whether or not facilities and dates and budgetary considerations are available in the city that they're interested in going to with a meeting. We can be very objective, neutral arbitrators and facilitators for meeting planners."