Choose Chicago wants a strategic plan to provide road map for spending hotel tax windfall

It’s not enough for Chicago’s convention and tourism agency to get a hotel tax windfall that doubles its marketing budget. They need to know how and where to spend that extra $50 million a year.

That’s why Choose Chicago has ordered a strategic plan and hired Chicago-based Hunden Partners to develop that roadmap for the next three-to-five years.

Hunden Partners has completed more than 1,200 similar studies nationwide, with $27 million in “destination development projects in progress around the world."

The firm’s work for Choose Chicago will include a “data-driven, community informed strategic plan” to guide the convention and tourism agency’s “priorities, investments and leadership” over the next three to five years.

"You're playing chess. You're not playing checkers. ... Every successful business needs a strategic plan, a road map, guardrails. You need to know where you're at to know where you're going," Choose Chicago board chair Guy Chipparoni told the Sun-Times.

The strategic plan is expected to be delivered within six months and cost "less than six figures," Choose Chicago CEO Kristen Reynolds said.

The contract was announced the day before Chicago’s already sky-high hotel tax climbs to 19%, highest in the nation, doubling a marketing budget that pales in comparison to other cities.

The 1.5-percentage-point increase will apply to hotels in all or part of 14 different wards — including Downtown, McCormick Place, the Illinois Medical District and Hyde Park — that have volunteered to impose the increase for the next five years.

Reynolds said it was time for a new strategic plan even without the hotel tax boost, since the old one expired Dec. 31.

But, it’s even more important to “avoid mission drift,” as she put it, with that extra $50 million in annual revenue on the horizon.

“It’s really important that we stay focused on those things that drive business, attract conventions, drive global awareness and impact. So, I’m really looking forward to seeing what Hunden Partners puts together for us,” Reynolds told the Sun-Times.

Reynolds has argued Chicago’s convention competitors “know very well that Chicago is underfunded, and they use it to their advantage” — not only to attract the same conventions, visitors and events Chicago wants, but also to “lure away legacy clients that have been coming to Chicago for decades.”

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has an annual operating budget of $457 million, according to a comparison prepared by Choose Chicago. That’s followed by Visit Orlando ($116 million), Discover Los Angeles ($62 million), the San Diego Tourism Authority ($56.9 million) and New York’s NYC & Company ($45 million).

Choose Chicago will now have a budget of about $90 million.

“We were just in such a lack of competitive stature with Las Vegas and Orlando, we’ve been actually slipping down into (the) lower market share of Indianapolis and Seattle and even Boston,” Reynolds said.

“That’s the biggest opportunity for us to reclaim our position as the largest convention center in North America. Second to that is there’s just so much opportunity from a marketing standpoint in both domestic and international markets that we’ve just never been able to afford to be in or to penetrate.”

Michael Jacobson, president of the Illinois Hotel & Lodging Association, noted that domestic leisure travel has been the “most resilient segment” of the travel industry in recent years.

But, the sky is the limit for growing Chicago’s “severely underwhelming” share of international travelers, even from cities with “direct flights” to and from O’Hare Airport, he said.

“People need to hear about your destination to think about your destination. Very few people book to visit a city without being influenced in some fashion to visit that city. And we’re silent — mostly because we haven’t had the resources to have a big presence in a lot of these countries,” Jacobson said.

“A lot of the international visitors simply connect onwards and are in transit at O’Hare. They don’t actually leave and spend time downtown.”

Even before Hunden Partners delivers the new road map, Reynolds has been plowing new ground in her home state of Arizona with Choose Chicago ads that ran during Cubs and White Sox spring training games in Arizona.

"Chicago had never done tourism ads during spring training in the Arizona market to say, `Come to Chicago,' even though we have a ton of ex-pats who live in Arizona," Jacobson said.

Chipparoni reiterated his desire to start "pushing" Chicago winters, instead of being defensive about it.

"We have incredible assets in the summer that we can winterize. Our lake doesn't close in the winter. It just looks cold and empty," he said.