Visit Frisco September Board Meeting

MEETING OF THE VISIT FRISCO BOARD OF DIRECTORS The Grove at Frisco Commons 8300 McKinney Rd. Common Hall Room Frisco, TX 75034 12:00 PM WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2020 MINUTES AGENDA Call Board Meeting to Order The meeting was called at 12:05pm by Jeff Smith. A motion was made by Jennifer Gustafson and seconded by Nick Shafer. Members in attendance: Jeff Smith, Jason Young, Rod Schaefer, Christal Howard, Jennifer Gustafson, Nick Shafer, Heather Fuxa and Kristin Grammar. Ex-officio member present; Thor Anderson and Kevin Hail. Tony Felker, President of the Frisco Chamber of Commerce was in attendance. Also, in attendance: Marla Roe, Executive Director and Henry Hill, Deputy City Manager. Staff present; Christina Miller, Director of Sales & Services, Cori Powers, Director of Marketing & Communication, Josh Dill, Director of Sports & Events and Sandy Shell, Senior Administrative Assistant. Citizen Input No Citizen Input was offered. Approval of Previous Board Meeting Minutes Jennifer Gustafson made a motion to approve the Visit Frisco Board Meeting Minutes for the Board Meeting on July 8, 2020. Nick Shafer seconded the motion and all approved.  Destination Analysts Presentation Marla introduced the Destination Analysts presenter Kimberly Vince-Cruz, Vice President of Destination Analysts. The presentation was given via Zoom. Marla shared that we had been working with Destination Analysts for some time sharing their data with us. The Power point presentation is available attached in the link below, and the highlights were shared with the Board of Directors. It is titled Coronavirus Travel Sentiment Index based on the week of September 7th, 2020. file:///C:/Users/sshell/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/Content.Outlook/0H SW0RTJ/Coronavirus%20Travel%20Sentiment%20Presentation%20Sept%209%20- %20Visit%20Frisco.pdf Reports – Christina Miller, Cori Powers and Josh Dill 1. Sales and Services – Marla introduced Christina Miller, Director of Sales and Services to start the reports. Christina started by saying there was some good news to share. They have booked three meetings in August for 2021. On the board report this time it shows the three new events booked and the cancelations were outside of the year, so it looks more accurate. There are 17 tentative compared to 75 last year. The three bookings that we did book were 1,173 rooms but we had to shrink those down because Brinker has a group coming this month that will we had to take a cut on that and we had a group at the end of July that was an Army group that only picked up 30 room nights. Christina referred to the Explanation of August Cancels and the additional list of Cancelations Rescheduled due to COVID – 19 at each table. The highlighted yellow ones are the potential rebooking’s that we are waiting on. Christina shared that she had received a concept report from Allen. They had gathered information from us, and she was pleased to find that we are pretty consistent with Plano and Allen. Plano had 59 RFP’s and Frisco had 55 RFP’s. 17 of ours were corporate and 22 of theirs were corporate. SMERF on both exceeds anything. They had a little bit more in sports. We will also be getting concepts from Dallas also. Jeff Smith mentioned that as far as fall activities at the Omni, they are getting small programs, but they are getting business. There has been some booking in the month that have been great. Where we are compared to the past is a shell of what we used to be to be transparent but when you think about the fall versus the summer, they have absolutely doubled their business. They are still receiving inquiries for November and December for this year. So, if you can take 4 or 5 smaller groups, that is a win. With this information they are better capable of staffing to meet the needs of the business. Better indicators will come after the Labor Day week. Also, when the vaccine is here thing will improve but they are saying that it will take up to 7 years to get back to pre-COVID business. When we get back to 50% business it will a massive win. In the past that would have been horrific but looking forward that would be incredible. Marla had met with some GM’s with some projections and she had thought they were worst case scenarios and the told her that they were still a little too aggressive. We are literally looking at it every single month. We got our collections for July and we were only about $3,000.00 off of what we had projected. This is still 2/3 less than we normally be projecting. We are thinking about FY22 having not even started FY21 yet. We are seeing the writing on the wall. Marla is meeting with Henry Hill and Finance all the time when were get the reports so we can go back and update them. It is tough and nobody has been able to accurately make projections right now. The interesting thing is that all the evacuees that we hosted, it was over 5100 rooms in our city, and they didn’t pay occupancy taxes because it was at the state government rate. They don’t pay the taxes at that rate. It was wonderful for the hotels that got the contracts. You will see the flood in the occupancy, but it will not reflect in the projections. Fortunately, we do get the weekly report so that helps us see the moving target. 2. Marketing and Communications Cori Powers, Director of Marketing and Communication updated the board on what the team have been doing. She shared that hopefully this would be a bit of a silver lining. We are still running the “Let’s Play Again!” We will probably be continue running that through October. It is preforming really well. In November we will probably switch to a holiday messaging. Our stats are doing phenomenally compared to industry averages. On all the display ads, the average click through rate is .7%. The industry average is .1% so ours is 7 times that. Our Gmail ads that we are running have contributed to over 800 click through to our website. Our video has been viewed over 500K times and that is at that 3 seconds but the 30 or more is at the 321K times. The majority are watching our entire video. Our page views went down 27% month over month and that’s just because we have to taper of budget as the are at the end of our Fiscal Year. If you have been on our website, we have been we have these really cool interactive presentation layers. They are just different stories around our community that we highlight. We did one at the beginning of the year on KidZania and we also did a supporting video to go with it. Of course, when COVID hit we did not do any marketing behind it because they were closed. Now that they have reopened, we are putting money behind distributing content on social media and our video. We did do some updates to it. We have images of people in masks. We also have a call out on how they are being socially responsible with COVID by putting different procedures and policies in place. This has been running since August. The average time on this page is 7:34 which is great. That video has been viewed at the 30 seconds or more 9,756 times so most people watching are watching the whole thing. For PR Communications we did a lot really great work in the month of August. We had two press releases. One was for the GBAC STAR Facilities that the city is doing. We also did a really quick turn around on the Hurricane Laura evacuees response. A lot of that got picked up locally which resulted in $784,303.00 PR media value which is an increase of 22% month over month. This was our third best month in the fiscal year. Cori was super excited to introduce our new Marketing Agency, VERB Interactive. This was a months long search with 16 proposals and 3 virtual interviews. VERB Interactive won out of all 16 agencies. They have hit the ground running. Technically we are supposed to start working with them in October, but they are already doing stuff for us. Everyone should have received an email to do a survey for us or a virtual interview for us. If you didn’t let us know. They are do at the end of the week. This is for them to get a better understanding of us since they can’t come here in person to experience the destination. They will get a better understanding of our attraction and our sentiment. They have also done some benchmarking on our website and our marketing efforts with social media. All of that will be shared when completed. 3. Sports and Events Josh Dill, Director of Sports and Events shared that we are booking sporting event at a short- term rate. Hockey is pretty valuable for us. We sent out a booking last week for a hockey event in January. We booked a hockey event for November that is repeat business. What we are seeing with those groups is that we are actually able to pull more of those rooms into Frisco because they are usually high peak nights and, in the past, we have been competing with The Colony and Plano. This year, a lot of our limited hotels are competitive on price. A majority of those rooms are staying here. It is a much more regional model for sports with smaller rural communities coming in to compete. The regional events are not as afraid of the virus. We are hoping that we can continue that kind of business. The main question Josh is getting asked is, “Is there really going to be an FCS Championship game in May?” The NCAA would like to see that happen, but they just laid off 600 of their staff for the rest of the year. So, the idea of planning a championship at that magnitude here is probably a little bit far-fetched. Outwardly when we are talking to media, we are saying that optimistically we are doing those things but ideally, us hosting an FCS Championship in May is pretty small. On the Frisco Bowl, we are still waiting to see how that goes. College football season is kicked off. We are optimistically thinking we can host that game here, but a lot of the college sports are in real jeopardy. We will probably loose our LoneStar Conference. Conference USA is going to be very scaled back. If the FCS does play in the spring, it will most like be that they play on campuses. Chuck and Josh had virtual conferences and one on one meetings with planners and the responses were really good. The GBAC information we are sending out is giving us good responses also. As far as the planners that are looking to plan, they are really looking at us because we are on the front of that kind of stuff. Executive Director Report Marla Roe, Executive Director shared the pickup report of the evacuees. You can see all the hotels that ended up taking them ended up with over 5100 rooms. Our staff was over at the Embassy helping them out with meal services. Not only did the state pay for the rooms, they got a $51.00 per person per-deim so all the hotels had to feed them three meals a day. Most of the hotels aren’t used to doing that. They are used to having breakfast only as a grab and go. We ran some economic impact modeling taking out a lot of things like transportation, retail and things like that, it ended up being about 1.4 million dollars. It was a great boost for the hotels and the city. All of these rooms check ins happened in about 24 hours. The Embassy ended up bringing in some staff from other areas to help out. I was extremely local coordinated. Our Fire Department and our EOC have such a great relationship with the state and without them this probably would not have happened. Frisco had the most participating hotels in the metroplex. The ones that stayed the longest were from Louisiana. Most of the rooms were not damaged during their stays and Marla mentioned that as part of the state contract, any damage would be covered. Our occupancy for FY20 was at 47% compared to 68% last year. Marla will be sending out the weekly report at the end of the week that will show the huge spike from the evacuees. We will just continue to forecast and reforecast. The City Council will be voting on the board positions next week. We will then start fresh in October for FY21. Tony Felker, President of the Frisco Chamber of Commerce is seeing some stability in the small growth happening very gradually. Marla shared that one of the biggest challenges with business travel is that they are figuring it out on how to make the virtual meeting work. Before the meeting closed, Jeff really thanked Marla and her leadership team for the great work they have done managing this very difficult time. Adjourn Board Meeting All the department monthly reports were given to the board in the Board Meeting Packets for review prior to the meeting. With no further business to discuss, the meeting ended at 1:01pm. Jennifer Gustafson made a motion to end the meeting and it was seconded by Nick Shafer. Approved: Kristin Grammar _________________________ Date _____________________ Please note these are preliminary results and are not official until approved at the next scheduled meeting. Approved/signed minutes are available at www.friscotexas.gov/docs