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The NTA Loves Pittsburgh
By David Cogswell
Published on: November 19, 2008
I often wonder how much the accessibility of a destination figures into whether we think of it as exotic. It only took an hour to fly from Newark to Pittsburgh for the annual conference of the National Tour Association (NTA) this week, but Pittsburgh is a touchingly beautiful and enchanting city -- no less so because it’s so easy to get to. Many cities across America don’t have the same brand cachet as Paris, Rome, Istanbul or Shanghai, but maybe a visit to Pittsburgh would be an exotic thrill to the people living in those cities.
I have heard raves about Pittsburgh from almost everyone I talk to this week. The Iron City clearly has won the heart of NTA delegates. Driving from the airport, which is about 16 miles from downtown Pittsburgh, you see the city gradually take shape around you as the suburban homes begin to appear on the forested hillsides and in the deep valleys. In mid-November, the peak of the fall foliage has already passed and the trees have mostly lost their leaves. But here and there you can still see traces of the brilliant yellows and reds of a few weeks before. Even with most of its tree leaves turned to brown, the city’s suburbs are lovely, a pleasing balance between the pastoral and the metropolitan.
Riding along Interstate 279, you enter the Fort Pitt Tunnel through Mount Washington. The daylight shuts off and you travel through the rhythmic, hypnotic repetition of tunnel lights flipping by one after another for three-quarters of a mile. Then suddenly you reach the end of the tunnel and in a flash the skyline of Pittsburgh is unveiled, right before your eyes, looming large and close. It makes a dramatic entrance like no other city.
Then you see the point where downtown Pittsburgh is perched between two rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, where they come together to form the great Ohio. The city’s skyscrapers and bridges gleam in the sun. At night the unveiling is even more dramatic with the city’s lights sparkling like Christmas trees. Seeing Pittsburgh is a very special experience, and it’s worthy place to visit even if it doesn’t take a long-haul flight to get here. From my window on the 11th floor of the Pittsburgh Hilton I can see the yellow Fort Pitt Bridge over the Monongahela River that leads back to the tunnel through Mount Washington, which looms over the city like an ancient wall.
There is much to praise about this city, though the night I came in it was all about the Pittsburgh Steelers and their battle with the San Diego Chargers, a game the Steelers were supposed to win handily, but barely squeaked by with a strange 11-10 victory. The Steelers were staying in the Hilton where I stayed, and it was mayhem. Then there was the snow. It snowed and snowed and snowed, but little of it stuck to the ground. At times the sky became a white sheet, then a few minutes later the air would be clear and the sun would come out. It was a constant, ever-changing spectacle.
Pittsburgh is a city with 400 bridges. It was the home of Carnegie, a former Wall Street executive who discovered the Bessemer method of processing steel in England, brought it back to America, and with the help of protective tariffs that kept out foreign competition he cornered the American market and became massively wealthy.
One NTA delegate told me she had grown up here and left when she married a Massachusetts man in the 1960s. She also was amazed at how beautiful the city is today. Back in the days when the steel mills ruled the city’s economy, the air was dirty. Every day you had to wipe away the collected grime and the city’s buildings were stained black. But that is no more. The smokestack industries have gone and Pittsburgh has replaced them with other forms of commerce, including health care, education, social services and, of course, tourism.
With rivers around the downtown, Pittsburgh bears a resemblance to Manhattan, and indeed the city is the nation’s largest inbound port, moving 50 million tons of goods a year. Not to be forgotten, Pittsburgh is the birthplace of Andy Warhol, and is still the home of the Andy Warhol Museum, which houses a large collection of the works of the painting world’s King of Pop.
As seductive as Pittsburgh is, the NTA might well be enamored of any city hosting its annual conference this year. Despite the gloom and doom of the economy, the tour operator group is riding a wave of success and prosperity beyond anything in its history. It had a surge of 154 new members this year, bringing the number of tour operators to 700 for the first time ever. That is in addition to 2,300 supplier and destination members.
The surge in membership was such a boon to the organization that the board notified members it would be lowering their membership fees to help them adjust to difficult economic conditions. NTA Chairman Bob Hoelscher said 70 percent of the new members joined to get in on NTA’s new status as the organization that will handle China’s outbound leisure travelers visiting the United States. It’s one of many remarkable recently triumphs of the association. Next spring NTA will be holding a business conference in Guam to focus on the China market.
NTA also has proved itself to be an industry leader with its government relations team, led by former Congressman Jim Santini, now ably assisted by Steve Richer. This team knows Washington and how to find its way through the legislative maze and get results. Other industry organizations have found it useful to join forces with NTA to take advantage of its legislative team to seek common goals for the travel industry. The association is now one of the leading voices calling for an Executive Office of Travel and Tourism, and plans a meeting of travel industry associations Dec. 16 to unify the industry’s message to the new administration that is taking shape in Washington.
NTA has proven so adept at running conventions for the last half century that it can now subcontract itself to manage conventions for other organizations. The NTA convention is a model of efficiency and effectiveness, and the organization is constantly trying new ideas and closely monitoring its membership for feedback to help it improve. NTA recently helped the World Religious Travel Association put together its first conference, and the two associations have agreed to hold their respective conferences together next year. This year, for the second year the convention has opened its doors to travel agents who want to participate in its Buyer-to-Buyer exchange.
Then there is Tourism Cares, a leader in helping the travel industry protect its environmental resources. Tourism Cares is a merger of two entities born out of NTA and a sister organization, the U.S. Tour Operators Association (USTOA), respectively. Tourism Cares used the Pittsburgh convention as the platform to announce its new program, called Save Our Sites (SOS), which is designed to reach beyond its previous domain in the travel industry to the traveling public itself in order to get travelers engaged in the preservation of endangered travel sites. NTA also signed a partnership last August with Sustainable Travel International, which has established an eco-certification program for travel industry companies.
Pittsburgh also was NTA’s first “green” convention, with a new awareness focused on limiting the environmental footprint of the event. For starters it’s being held in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, which is billed as the “first and largest certified green convention center in the world.” The center is ingeniously designed to conserve energy and to recycle resources. NTA also put a number of new policies into effect to conserve resources, such as refraining from printing material that can be emailed, recycling badge holders, eliminating event tickets and handouts, and recycling waste.
Instead of the proliferation of plastic water bottles that happens at most conventions, each delegate was given one plastic water bottle that was refillable at various stations around the convention center. It was gratifying to be part of a process that changed the way people customarily foul the environment in every day lives. All together, the energy at this year’s NTA conference is so bright and positive that it’s genuinely inspiring. Even as we hear more bad news about the economy, the NTA is riding a wave of success and optimism that is infectious. For more information on NTA, visit www.ntaonline.com. For more information on Pittsburgh, visit www.visitpittsburgh.com.
David Cogswell
Executive Editor-Tours & Packages
dcogswell@pmgemail.com
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