Last week, I had the pleasure of representing Tourism Kelowna at the Northwest Event Show in Seattle, Washington. The purpose of attending this event was two-fold: to take advantage of networking with meeting planners from Washington and to scope out future sponsorship opportunities for Tourism Kelowna and our meeting-program partners.
Within 10 minutes of sitting down at the opening keynote breakfast, I had made a number of meaningful connections with meeting planners and will be pursuing an opportunity to bid on a future cloud conference or retreat as a result of those early meetings. Although Tourism Kelowna was not exhibiting at the conference, the opportunities to connect with the more than 3,000 attendees were abundant. While attending the wide array of educational sessions and networking on the tradeshow floor during the two-day conference, I met meeting planners from a variety of businesses including Amazon, Google, SHWorldwide, and Microsoft.
Attending the conference also allowed me to consider how Tourism Kelowna could sponsor a portion of the event next year so we can bring partners down and have a presence beyond the tradeshow floor. Some possible opportunities include sponsoring a breakout session or a session within the exhibition hub; the sessions were well attended by planners as they could earn credits towards their CMP accreditation. By exhibiting and sponsoring in 2020, Tourism Kelowna and our partners will be able to build new relationships within the Seattle market while we strengthen existing connections. I will be following up with the event organizers in the coming weeks and will provide an update to our meeting partners once we have dates and specific details on the 2020 event.
For further information, please reach out to me at (587) 716-5599 or via email at nicolle@tourismkelowna.com.
