Meeting and Event Planning Guide: Q&A with Visit Indy’s CEO

While 2024 is shaping up to be Indianapolis’ best year for tourism since 2019—and might surpass that high-water mark—the calendars for 2025 and beyond are still coming together. Some events, like the WNBA All-Star Game and WWE’s Royal Rumble, are already on the books, alongside longtime events like the Performance Racing Industry trade show, National FFA convention and others, but the city’s tourism agency is continuing to fill out the calendar.

Leonard Hoops, CEO of Visit Indy, sat down with IBJ for a roving, hour-long conversation that touched on topics that ranged from state and local politics to development along the White River, marketing the city and the upcoming event slate.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the ongoing, and quite busy, 2024 calendar that we’re continuing to make our way through. Overall, how would you evaluate this year’s run for the conventions and events industry in Indianapolis?

I think 2024 is an example of all the things that make Indy special, coming together all at once. You think back to the 1970s: The late, great Jim Morris and so many others, [like] Mayor Lugar, began this vision of Indianapolis as this gathering place—sports being one part of that and conventions being another part. That has really—in 2024, 50-plus years later as we’ve built out our downtown—connected things, and we’ve become more popular as a destination.

And it all just kind of seemed to coalesce in 2024, right? We had the NBA All-Star Game in February, the NFL Combine, the first and second round of [the] NCAA men’s basketball tournament, USA Swimming, and we got lucky with the eclipse—that’s just pure luck right there, but the fact that we marketed it the way we did, as early as we did … we got more out of it than anybody else did.

We also had the National Eucharistic Congress, which was off the charts; then you throw in the first year of the Sweets and Snacks Expo after their trial run during the pandemic … and an all-time record for Gen Con, with 71,000 people. Any one of those things would make for a great year in a lot of cities, and we’ve had them all—and we still have National FFA, Taylor Swift and PRI yet to come.

Does having a calendar like that affect the way prospective clients view Indianapolis?

I always joke that, if you throw in some sprinkles or chocolate chips or marshmallows or whatever … you can make vanilla pretty cool. There are destinations that would like to be vanilla because they’re below that, right? We’ve [been] building at least since the Super Bowl in 2012, then the USA Today No. 1 convention city in 2014, and now we’re in 2024, and all these things we just discussed are happening. People are now going, “Hey, wait a second. Is Indy the next big thing?” And that’s what we’ve been promoting.

So let’s look ahead to 2025. What events are coming down the pike next year that you think people should be looking forward to?

With so much going on, I sometimes … have to go look at my convention calendar to see what we’ve laid down, but 2025 is another busy year. Obviously, we just landed the WNBA All-Star Game, then we have the WWE Royal Rumble, as well as an NCAA men’s basketball regional. We’ll have the Combine again, too, plus all of our big annual conventions.

It won’t be as big of a year in terms of major events as 2024—it’s hard to replicate a 2024 every single year, especially when you get everything from events you’ve been working on for a decade, like an NBA All-Star Game to cosmic anomalies like an eclipse. But there’s plenty happening in 2025 and 2026; if you go just that additional year out, you’re looking at NCAA Men’s Final Four, you’re looking at the opening of the Signia [hotel] and phase six expansion of the Indiana Convention Center in the fourth quarter. We’re hosting the American Society of Association Executives, too.

There’s a lot of stuff happening in 2026 and in 2025 as we get a new governor and a new gubernatorial administration and new leadership at IEDC, or however the Secretary of Commerce office is going to be set up under that administration. I think you’ll see a lot of progress in 2025, though, on our destination vision.

Would you consider 2025 to be something of a breathing or recovery year for the industry?

I almost feel that that would be perceived as a pejorative—nobody wants us to breathe; they want us to just run full tilt and collapse at the finish line and then start over again and do it all over, and that’s how we feel, too. We always work with a sense of urgency.

Let’s talk about funding, because obviously in the wake of the pandemic, a lot of budgets were slashed, including Visit Indy’s to less than a quarter of what it was pre-pandemic. It’s slowly been working its way back up with funding from the Capital Improvement Board, and this year the approved budget is essentially back to the full amount. You’re also expected to get a bump next year, as well. Why is that a good investment for the CIB, for the city, to make?

Well, the number varies every year, but we have tracked as much as a 90-to-1 return on investment in terms of the [spending] the visitors do in Indy versus the public dollars that are invested in Visit Indy. I think anybody, if you gave them a buck and they gave you 90 back, would take that investment—and more like 9- or 10-to-1 on the tax-dollar side. So that’s a great investment, and I think that’s why they would want to do it.

You could argue that they potentially should be putting even more investment in any [group] that’s doing that kind of return, but there’s bond debt, there’s all sorts of other things … so, I think from their perspective, they give us an optimal amount to maximize returns. We certainly advocate that there’s no amount you could give us that we wouldn’t give you a great return, but part of that, too, is, we have to continually drive product development. We think we’re funded at a good level right now to sell what we currently have, but that we all need to be thinking about product development and having more to sell in the future.

What opportunities do you see for Visit Indy to harness new ideas that could be tourism drivers?

Well, if you’re talking about just how we market and deliver content to our customers, I would say that AI is where we’re looking at right now. One of the things that … presents is looking at what you can do with Chat GPT and some other resources like that. You can say, “Hey, I’m going to go to Indianapolis on a Sunday through a Tuesday with two kids who are these ages, and we really like such and such.” And the more criteria you give it, the more it’s going to build you something specific, including knowing maybe what’s not open on Monday. So we’re looking at [those] tools for our website to achieve that.

[For members of] our entire executive team … whether you’re in convention sales, whether you’re in destination experience or you’re in leisure marketing—we’ve all got goals on, “How can we use AI to further generate return on investment and to further satisfy our customers?” … Everybody’s talking AI, but what does it tangibly manifest itself into?

Last year, a contingent of more than two dozen people took a trip to Singapore to better understand the country’s use of waterfront property and how to drive visitors and tourism. When are we going to start seeing some results and some new ideas coming out of Visit Indy, the White River State Park or the state about how to incorporate some of those concepts or derivations of those into what some argue to be the most underused amenity in the city and state, in the White River?

Those discussions have been ongoing and constant since we got back from Singapore, and they’re still going. … The biggest challenge I have seen in getting some of these ideas off the ground—and there’s some really good ones that I can’t really get into right now—is the timing of the governor’s election. We were hoping to get some things done maybe in the last year of this governorship, and Gov. Holcomb has been very supportive, but there just hasn’t been enough time to wrangle everybody into place to get a commitment for spending on certain things, but I remain incredibly optimistic that the momentum is still there, without question.

You are now the chair of the PCMA, formerly known as the Professional Convention Management Association, making you the first from a destination development organization to have that role. You also were recently recognized by another industry group, Destinations International, as an industry leader for tourism. How big of a role do you think all of that is playing in helping Indianapolis draw and harness new opportunities?

I think it has played a role in the medical groups we’ll be formally announcing later this year. But that’s also from a combination of factors—everything from the fact that we’re building the Signia and the expansion, to this kind of perception [that we have a lot going on], combined with the idea that, “Hey, that guy … just got the Destination Leadership Award, he’s the PCMA chair, and he runs Indy. So maybe Indy is cooler than we think.”

You shift perception when you are USA Today’s No. 1 convention city. You shift perception when the guy running the [organization] happens to be the chair of a global association in the events industry. And you shift perception when you’re hosting the NBA All Star Game, when you get all three big WWE events at the same time, when you host a Super Bowl and a Final Four and a WNBA All Star Game. You start adding up all these little shifts of perception, and perception changes.

What’s the latest on the ongoing efforts to not only retain the NFL Combine but potentially bring the NFL Draft here?

We’re optimistic that we will continue to retain the Combine one to two years at a time for the foreseeable future. I would love for it to get to the point—and I think this is possible—where the NFL owners that have wanted this in their cities come to the conclusion that the operations people for the NFL don’t want it going anywhere, that it’s more complicated than they anticipate with medical and other aspects of it, to run it and just move it around, even doing it two years at a time in other cities. So, I remain optimistic that we will keep it … more today than I was, say, two or three years ago.

The feedback I’ve gotten—not directly from the NFL, but indirectly from others who have spoken in the NFL about it … is that as long as we keep the Combine, the less likely we are to get the Draft. There’s a lot of other owners that sort of feel like Indy gets this thing every year, and it’s not fair to the other cities who want to host the Draft or a Super Bowl or whatever else that they don’t get an annual event … once in a blue moon.

So the good news, bad news of the Combine is … for the foreseeable future, I see us keeping it. The bad news is, for the foreseeable future, I think that limits our chances of getting a Draft. If we were to lose the Combine, that would be the bad news, [but] I think that would significantly enhance our chances of getting a Draft. I would just as soon keep getting the Combine every year, and I think most people in the community, if you have an every-year combine versus a once-a-decade draft, would take it, but I would certainly love both, if that was in any way possible.

While Chicago and Milwaukee over the past couple of months have hosted the Democratic and the Republican national conventions, respectively, Indianapolis has really not pursued hosting these political gatherings. Do you expect that that will continue through the next few election cycles, or would you like to see Indy pursue either the RNC or the DNC?

I think it’s extremely unlikely, and if it were up to us at Visit Indy and the hotel community, it’s extremely unlikely that we would pursue either.

We’ve been asked by the state to look at the RNC. We’ve been asked by the city and the city council to look at the DNC, ever since I got here in 2011 and every time those [requests for proposals] come out. If you dig into the RFPs in great detail, and you look at the amount of dates that they want to hold space, if you look at the costs that have to be raised by the equivalent of the local organizing committee, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, if you look at the security costs, if you look at all the bid specs, I’m honestly amazed that any of the cities [bid] from a pure business evaluation.

If you were to strip the title of the event away from it—you don’t call it RNC or DNC, you just call it mystery group A or mystery group B—and you hand me the RFP, I would say, “I’m not bidding on this,” and that’s without even knowing that half the country will dislike you as a result of it, no matter which, which party you pick.

So, when we’ve had requests at the state or city level, and we actually walk through in any sort of great detail with them, the challenges we have with what’s asked for in the RFP, we’ve had no pushback. We’d probably have to hold off on holding Gen Con that year, as the date space would overlap them and [as many as] three other groups … when you consider the opportunity cost of what you would have lost in order to clear the dates for groups like that.

That’s a long answer, but the short answer is, they don’t make a lot of business sense to us, regardless of party.•