Jim Browder
When the legislature adjourned without funding a renovation of Rupp Arena and an expansion/relocation of the city’s convention facilities, Jim Browder, president of VisitLex — formerly the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau — said the delay and uncertainty in the project was all in a day’s work.
“In our world, our job is to sell what they build,” he said. “When I came here … I didn’t come here and say, ‘Hey, you need to rebuild Rupp; you need to redo the convention center.’ I inherited the environment, and my job is to sell it and make sure that this is a preferred destination to convention groups.”
Recruiting
His angle in recruiting groups to hold meetings, conferences and conventions in Lexington — some of which are currently looking at dates in the 2020s — has been tweaked in the past year as it looked like construction could occur.
“When a construction process starts … our job is still to drive economic impact to the city. So we have already started a process six to eight months ago to kind of split our sales responsibilities, so we’re not only searching for the larger citywide conventions for the future, but we’re also trying to generate single property leads to the hotels,” he said.
Regardless, if the city’s main convention center is 100 percent operable, his mission doesn’t change: providing room nights for area hoteliers.
Visitors Center relocation possible
In January, VisitLex announced it had brought in a record crowd in its first full year at its new Visitors Center in The Square. Twenty-five thousand people passed through the center’s doors in 2013, after opening the previous October. Since relocating to the space across from Triangle Park, however, ownership of what was known as Victorian Square has changed, and Browder said the Visitors Center might find a new home, even before its lease is up in three years.
“Obviously staying there has been one of the options,” he said. “We have been working with the group that owns the property to see if there are options to relocate that would benefit them and benefit us at the same time.”
The Visitors Center has also earned what Browder said is a rare distinction as it rates No. 9 on TripAdvisor.com’s top attractions for Lexington. While the 1,500-square-foot facility has proved popular among visitors, Browder says there’s a more important aspect to it.
“While we see 25,000 people, the importance of that is we send them right back out into the community to restaurants and shops and things like that, so I think it has had a huge benefit for economic impact,” he said.
New name
At the start of the year, the name of the group changed to VisitLex from the longer name, which had been abbreviated as LCVB. Browder said the name change has made the organization more attractive to visitors.
“The whole point in the rebranding was to make everyone feel more comfortable about approaching us. When you get into those long names of bureaus, people tend to think it’s a structure thing you have to go through or it’s governmental,” he said. “This makes it a lot more causal, a lot more approachable.”
About Jim Browder
Title: President, VisitLex
Age: 57
Hometown: Portsmouth, Va.
Education: B.S. in business management from Radford University
Previously: Vice president of sales and marketing, JHM Hotels