With One Year To Go Until The Democratic National Convention, Tips From The 2000 Republican Convention
By Pat Loeb
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Philadelphia is anxiously awaiting the Pope's visit in two months but save some of your energy: The Democratic National Convention is just one year away and the woman who organized the last nominating convention the city hosted says it will take another huge, city-wide hospitality effort.
But she's confident we can pull it off.
"I think Philadelphians rise to the occasion," says Comcast executive Karen Buchholz, who was president of Philadelphia 2000 which brought the Republican National Convention here for the first nomination of George W. Bush.
Already, she notes, the DNC host committee has a number of advantages.
"They're able to build on a foundation that we (created) not so long ago," she says.
Listen to full interview here...
Philadelphia 2000 was starting from scratch and, she admits, made some mistakes. One of the biggest was its hotel room inventory.
"One of the biggest concerns site selection committees had with Philadelphia was we didn't have enough hotel rooms to serve a convention," she recalls. "So we had to do a great general accounting of all the hotel rooms. When we first went out with our list, the list wasn't entirely scrubbed and some of them didn't quite meet the... standards. So we got some publicity that maybe our hotel rooms were not up to par."
She credits the city's hospitality industry with making sure everything went smoothly. "Had our community not stepped up, we really would have been in trouble."
Another advantage, she says, is the great technological advances since 2000. She laughs remembering the VHS tape and glossy magazine her committee sent to convention-goers to sell them on Philadelphia. This time around, visitors will have devices and apps to help them navigate.
But she stresses that the key to success will be Philadelphians themselves.
"High tech alone can't do it," she says, "we need the high touch component of our own people welcoming and being hospitable."
Buchholz says her committee enlisted 15,000 volunteers and trained them to help visitors. She suggests a similar effort this time around.
She also extolled the "Convention Experience," a virtual taste of what was going on inside the arena, so that Philadelphians could feel part of the event, even though most would never get near it.
The 2016 convention, she says, has an even greater potential to show off Philadelphia's many assets to a national audience.
"We have even more restaurants than we did and even more neighborhoods popping up and more millennials. It's just good energy and good momentum," says Buchholz.
