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August 12, 2024 10 mins
In this episode, I speak with Gregg Caren, President and CEO of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau (PHLCVB). Gregg leads the bureau’s mission to position Philadelphia as a top destination for meetings, conventions, sporting events, and international tourism. He also collaborates closely with the Pennsylvania Convention Center, national industry associations, and the City of Philadelphia to bolster the city’s tourism and hospitality sectors. Website and Social Media:
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, and welcome to Insight, a show about empowering
our community. I'm Lorraine Ballard. Tomorrow want to stop smoking,
We'll tell you about free resources to help you kick
the habit, and we'll talk to an impressive young black scientist.
But first we chat with one of Philly's biggest cheerleaders.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hi, it's Greg Karen.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
I'm the President and CEO of the Philadelphia Convention and
Visitors Bureau.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Tell us about the mission of the Philadelphia Convention in
Visitors Bureau.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
We're kind of a highly specialized economic development agency. Formerly,
what we're referred to is we are the official tourism
promotion agency for the city of Philadelphia globally, and we're
also the official sales and marketing arm for our convention center,
the beautiful building in the middle of town that is
actually owned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But the way
I like to refer to what I do is the
way I was trained years ago, is to talk about

(00:46):
what's the end result of what we do. And so
if I fast forward to the end result to really
explain what we do, I ask people to think about
what it's like when they are walking in this middle
of center city and Wressemania fans are running up and
down the streets, or during the Army Navy game, when
the entire city feels like a campus of West Point
or the Naval Academy, and even more simply people don't
notice it until we talk about it, but just that

(01:09):
feeling when you see people walking up and down Market
in Chestnut, in the streets of Philadelphia wearing hangtags.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
And name tags with whatever association they happen to be with.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
All those things really are the end result of what
we do in our organization and really is a major
driver of our economy in Philadelphia and in Southeast PA.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
What you do is to encourage folks to come to
Philadelphia to experience the richness and the beauty of this
wonderful city which I love so much. And I wonder
if you can just speak to what is it about
Philadelphia that makes it such a special destination for people?

Speaker 3 (01:40):
You know, I usually go down two or three different paths.
I mean, one is just a pure logistical one. That's
the easy first answer. Our centrality on the Northeast card
and really the densest part of our nation, and people
don't know if everybody knows American Airlines. We're their largest
transatlantic hub for flights for American Airlines out of the US.
All those things make us a really perfect location just geographically.

(02:03):
When you think about the highways and the rail lines
of Amtrak and our airport, all those.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Things come together nicely.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
Then you add some of the other logistics of some
fourteen thousand hotel rooms and a world class convention center
and start layering in all the other stuff that we
start to think about ourselves as residents and people in
the area, and that is the richness of our culture, diversity, history,
the gastronomic scene. All those things that make this such
a wonderful place to work make it an extremely attractive destination,

(02:29):
whether you're doing a national medical convention or you're one
of the Divine Nine looking to have your annual meeting here.
We have such a rich history, as you know, we
have the first two historically black college and universities in
the country right here in Philadelphia, and that just gives
us all of that such a great backdrop, so that
when people come here, they truly do feel the richness
and diversity of our city, whether they're here from a

(02:50):
professional event, a fraternal event, a sporting event, the backdrop
of the city, and the richest into the city all
make it an extraordinary value proposition for planners of these events.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
As a Philadelphia booster, what is one thing that you
think that anyone visiting Philadelphia absolutely must experience?

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Wow?

Speaker 3 (03:12):
I think that anybody coming to Philadelphia must experience the
people of Philadelphia itself. And maybe it's a cheap answer
because it's too hard for me to go to the
food scene or the art scene and the art museum
and an old city. I think what is most eye opening, though,
for people who visit us for the first time, is
that blend of culture that we represent, right, that great

(03:35):
history that we've got, not just American history and the
seat of Him of Western democracy and all those other
wonderful things that just make this the most special place
on the planet, especially as we encroach on twenty twenty six.
But it is the people of Philadelphia, you know, the
way you know. I listened to another one of your
interviews and a dear friend of mine, Sasha, who runs
the Art Museum, was talking about going to donors fundraisers

(03:56):
and talking about how they'll.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Be talking about art in this elite way.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
But there's a Phillies game playing in the background, and
she never experienced that in any other places. And I
think that is the beauty of our city is that
the people that live, work, and visit us are looking
for all of that. You know, there are so many
places you can go and find just great arts or
great food or great but there is just so much
of everything here and the way it sort of represents

(04:21):
itself through the people of Philadelphia. Yeah, we're gritty, and
we can be raw, and we can be blunt, and
you know, our sports fans can shant. Nobody likes us
and we don't care. But at the end of the day,
it all comes together to form one of the most
special cities in North America and maybe in the world.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Well, you've accomplished a lot in your career and now
you here are the CEO of the Philadelphia Convention and
Visitors Bureau, and I wonder if you can talk about
some lessons you learned along the way that helped you
get to where you are today.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Great question.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I think about that a lot, and I also think
about a lot of the fact that I may be
in a minority of people who actually have ended up
at what's closer to the talent of my career than
the begin in the same place that I started. Even academically.
I actually went to Penn State University for their hotel
restaurant management program, and pretty much everything that I've done
since that graduation in the early nineteen eighties has really been.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
A component of that.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
And if you look at what the Convention and Visitors
Bureau is meant to do, it's to promote everything that
I just spoke about about what's special about the city.
But at the end of the day, it starts with
our convention center, our sports complex, and our hotels and restaurants,
the true venues that will host anywhere from one thousand
to fifty thousand people coming to visit us. And the

(05:33):
last stop on my career. Prior to taking this role,
just four years ago, at the front end of the pandemic,
was working for the company that actually manages our convention
center here in Philadelphia. It's a global company. We had
a portfolio of three hundred and fifty venues of all
types all over the world, and I think the most
beautiful part for me was I had a portfolio of
about one hundred convention centers from San Francisco to Chicago,

(05:55):
from Fort Lauderdale to Long Beach to Shenzhend, China, to Montigo, Bea, Jamaica,
as well as our venue right here in Philadelphia. But
this has been my home for the last thirty years.
And what I was able to see by having access
to convention centers in all these other destinations and their
tourism organizations and their mayors and their city councils, and

(06:16):
they're all the things that make up sort of the
ecosystem of our world. Here in Philadelphia, I was really
able to see the best and the worst of how
public and private sectors work together, how nonprofits actually come
together or don't. And in every city I would go to,
I would meet mayors and city council members, and I
would meet and I use the word lovingly, the word bureaucrats,

(06:37):
people that are truly career civil.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Servants and wear them as a badge of honor, and.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
Truly see people that use words like civic pride and
civic responsibility. And I always admired that in all those people.
But at the end of the day, I was working
for a massive for profit corporation with a couple of
private equity flips and a merger that left.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
That said about, you know, two billion dollar company.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
When I left the company sixty five thousand employees around
the world, and I found myself uniquely in the position
of thinking about my own civic pride and my own
civic responsibility.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
And although this is my.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Adopted home, I've lived here longer than anywhere else, and
I truly love this city and I love the people
of it, and I found myself using those words. It
was really the reason I took the position was the
world had just closed down with the pandemic literally as
start of.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
My job in June of twenty twenty.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
So a smarter person would have probably run back to
is his for profit company and said, you know, let
me just stay a little bit safer than this new world.
But I truly did feel the responsibility of the eighty
thousand or so people that live and work in our city,
in our industry. That's about how many people that are
Philadelphians that work in tourism and hospitality and the related businesses.

(07:44):
And I took it as my own personal obligation, along
with our elected leaders and our private sector partners or hoteliers,
to do everything I could to help get people back
to work and make us a thriving tourism and convention
in big event destination once again.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
And that's been the last years.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
And now we're trying to be a little bit more
forward thinking and more strategic than the survival that we
were really, say, three or four years ago.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Right, So my second to the last question is elevator pitch.
You know, you're talking to some fella and some lady
in the Midwest and their family, and why would they
want to come to Philadelphia.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
It is that unique combination of everything I said before.
It is you may have heard. We actually were just
rated for the second time in a row as the
most walkable city in America. And when I think about
all these other cities, cities that I have visited, whether
it was for work or personally, and it's easy to
get lost in very very urban settings. But when you

(08:40):
think about the fact that if you were to stop
at the start of the steps of the Art Museum,
whether you're inside looking at the artwork or outside, you know,
taking a rocky pose at the top of the steps
and walk straight across our center city over to Old
City and depends landing It's a one hour walk across
the entire sort of from river to river as we say,
river to river and pine divine as sort.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Of how we talk about it.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
But then when you think about starting to meander through
one of the most historic neighborhoods in the country, mandering
through one of the most historic chinatowns in the country,
mandering through the most historic square mile in a country.
It's those things that when you add them together, and
along with the access and the ease of getting in
and out of Philadelphia, that whether it's for a convention

(09:21):
delegate or a tourist coming here from the Midwest or
from China, I think we just have an extraordinary story
to tell. We're also a more affordable destination than a
lot of other Northeast sister cities.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
So you add this all together, it is.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Just such a great whether you're a family or a
couple or a solo, we see a lot of people
that come here for one reason and ending up coming
back for another.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
I'm sold. If people want more information about the Pennsylvania
Convention and Visitors Bureau, where do they go?

Speaker 2 (09:48):
So our website is discover PHL dot com.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
So just like the abbreviation of our airport, DISCOVERPHL dot com.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
We'll have more insight after these messages.
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