Southern Indiana lands travel conference in 2024
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
A New York-based organization that brings together tour operators from throughout North America has selected Jeffersonville to host its annual trade show next year.
Travel Alliance Partners (TAP) will bring the 2024 TAP Dance Travel Conference to the Clark County city, which Todd Read, trade and consumer sales manager for SoIN Tourism, said is the result of a site visit earlier this year by TAP officials that went better than expected
“We incorporated all of our big pillars here like the riverfront, our history, some of our culinary scene, our arts and history, cultural attractions, and just let them see all the different things that we had to offer,” he said. “And once we got them in, I think before we even had lunch, they were like, ‘Okay, this is the place that we’re going to be for 2024.”
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Read said hosting the conference will be huge for the region.
“We are a destination that once these tour operators come to our area, and they see our area for the first time, in a lot of cases, they will want to come back,” Read said. “They will get a chance to see some of our top attractions. They’ll see our hotels. They’ll see our restaurants, and they will go back and start to think about, ‘How do we get our groups to come back to this area? And how do we create itineraries?'”
TAP is comprised of tour operators that offer travel packages for motor coach adventures, rail journeys, cruises, and safaris, among others. The TAP Dance conference allows tour operators to showcase their offerings and gives suppliers, like SoIN Tourism, the chance to pitch their destinations to the operators.
The event, which has been held since 2001, will take place June 9-11, 2024 at the Sheraton Louisville Riverside Hotel in Jeffersonville. SoIN Tourism, the convention and tourism bureau for Clark and Floyd counties, said this year’s conference in Rochester, New York saw 500 hotel room nights booked.
TAP Executive Director Lisa Doerner said the collaboration among regional partners was key to choosing Jeffersonville for next year’s event.
“Todd Read engaged area hospitality partners to build a conference that reflects the high-quality transportation, accommodations, entertainment, food and attractions that TAP Dance attendees expect,” Doerner said in a news release. “We look forward to showing off this beautiful region to travel industry professionals.”
Read said hosting the conference will benefit more than just Clark and Floyd counties. He said attendees will get a chance to visit other areas of southern Indiana.
“We’ve put together a four-day, three-night tour itinerary where you can come into all of our different locations, see all of our different attractions, because we get a lot of people that travel across Interstate 64, and it just benefits our entire region as a whole,” he said. “So once these tour operators get here, for us, it’s a great return on an investment. We bring them in, they see the area, and they want to come back.”
While next year’s conference may only be a one-time event for Jeffersonville, Read said he believes the effort to host the event could spark additional business in the future.
“I think that once we can handle a conference of this size and of this magnitude, we can start to look at [bringing] other trade shows in the group to our market,” he said. “And we should be able to handle some of those bigger shows [and] other people will start looking at us.”