International Pow Wow: What didn’t happen in Vegas

As the future host cities for the mega US travel trade show International Pow Wow are named this week, TravelMole managing director Graham McKenzie reflects on the choice of Las Vegas for this year’s event.

So by now most of the UK delegates for IPW 2013 (International Pow Wow) will be back home enjoying the summer weather. I say this because I find it hard to believe that anybody would have enjoyed the desert climate of Las Vegas , venue for IPW13.

I spent five days in the Nevada epicentre of global party entertainment and during that time endured a maximum of 45 minutes in the open air. Thirty minutes of my outdoor adventure was chasing up and down The Strip with my college Frank Docherty  trying to secure the services of a taxi. He assured me that he knew where he could get one despite the fact that he had never been to Vegas before … he did not. 

The Saturday, my first full day in Vegas, temperatures topped out at approximately 120F and people were still lying by the pool ‘trying’ to get …what…tanned ? Cooked? Burnt? Killed? You notice that I record the top temperatures in Fahrenheit. In a typically English way, had I been in Murmansk in February you can guarantee I would be using the Celsius scale just to emphasise the extreme.

Vegas, as I am sure you are aware, is the party and entertainment capital of the western world. Full of spectacular sights, sounds and superlatives. The hotels , all of which seem good, are very formulaic, with hundreds if not thousands of rooms, numerous restaurants that are linked to famous individuals or brand names, bars a plenty and an area roughly the size of the new Wembley stadium pitch dedicated to gambling.  They are, in short, enormous. It’s like checking into Westfield shopping centre every time you come back from a night out and simply want to lie down and go to bed but instead have an extra health giving aerobic 5k walk to get to your room.

Getting to your hotel is an interesting experience as well. I say interesting, challenging is more accurate. It would appear that Steve Wynn, founder of the Wynn and Encore hotels  (he liked the first one so much he did a …yes you got it…an Encore) has a monopoly on in-taxi entertainment.  In the back of each cab there is small screen that permanently plays commercials for his hotels,  with what I assume is his voice, which is a mash-up of Clint East wood at his Dirty Harry best and the guy who does the voiceovers for the Honda ads. To say it’s annoying is a vast understatement – ‘You like Sushi, I got Sushi’ , ‘You like steak, I got steak’, ‘I think Frank (Sinatra I assume and not Spencer) would have liked this. I knew Frank, Frank was a friend’ and on and on and on. The cab challenge in Vegas is not to smash the screen into smithereens.

Back to IPW13. There is no doubt that the US Travel Association put on a great conference/exhibition. It works. The slick appointment system, the understated stands, the lunch system and the organised functions all seemed  to operate like clockwork with lots of return on the investment in the currency of good business contacts.

Las Vegas

 It is difficult to find fault, but for me the only question would be is Vegas the best location? With the size, the heat, the draw of the entertainment and Steve Wynn’s omnipresent voice it’s the more casual, bump into, see at the bar type networking which is almost totally absent.

At any conference the extra return on investment and often the most valuable is that of the non-planned encounter where you meet somebody who has a mutual interest, somebody you could do business with but didn’t know it. In Vegas that seemed less likely than anywhere else and because of that, what didn’t happen in Vegas will stay in Vegas – at least until 2020 when the city will again host IPW.

In the meantime, the event will be staged in Chicago (2014), Orlando (2015), Miami (2016), Washington DC (for the first time ever in 2017), Denver (2018) and Anaheim (2019).