Meet Geraldine Bordelon, CMP, Director of Destination Sales at Visit Baton Rouge.

Visit Baton Rouge was feeling really good about 2020 when an event it had been preparing for some time was a huge success.

“We had a great event, it was a tourism event in March. We worked on it for two years and brought in around 700 people at the Convention Center and all the hotels downtown,” said Geraldine Bordelon, the Director of Destination Sales for the organization. “So we end the first quarter with a boom. We were going to have a great 2020 and then that’s when the bottom fell out.”

For Bordelon and the Visit Baton Rouge team, it was time to shift gears and fast. Questions of what to do about booked 2020 business, leads for later in 2020 and beyond.

Touching base with the hotels was critical to make sure her team and the hotels were all on the same page when communicating with the clients who had business later in the year. “All we did was talk and negotiate and rebook just non-stop. We followed the lead of the hotel,” said Bordelon as her group looked toward the future. “That (following the hotel lead) was the 2020 plan. Then we said let’s secure 2021 and 2022, make sure those (events) were good, the contracts were good and following up with the clients.”

Bordelon said her team wanted to help clients where they could whether they were cancelling the meeting or moving it on line.

“My goodness, Zoom was our best friend, right. So we had a lot of Zoom calls,” said Bordelon whose team worked internally with marketing and their Experience group (which handles services like transportation and entertainment). “For those that cancelled, we wanted to be creative on how we could increase attendance (for the future). What do they need — images, press releases, what could we offer in-kind (services) to get the momentum going. Yes we cancelled, but guess what we are doing it (the meeting) in 2021.

“There were a handful of groups that moved to virtual meetings, we offered them virtual backgrounds (of Baton Rouge). And said if you were supposed to be in Baton Rouge and you’re not, but you are still proceeding with the meeting, hey here are some images if you want to do a virtual background to keep Baton Rouge in mind.”
Communicating with the hotels also provided a second positive purpose for Bordelon and her team.

“At the end of March, when we started getting media calls, we (her and her four person team split up the hotels) started touching base with the hotels,” Bordelon recalled. “We continued updates on who was open, who was closed and passed that on to the marketing department so when the CEO would get calls (from the media), he knew the hotel status.”

There is no way Bordelon could have ever imagined all of this scrambling and dealing with all this change when she was living in her home country of Malaysia dreaming of working in this business. Bordelon came to Louisiana from Malaysia in her early 20’s and subsequently married a Louisiana man.

“I always wanted to work in the hospitality industry,” said Bordelon, who got her break when she was doing part time work for Louisiana’s International Tax-Free Shopping office (Louisiana was the first state to offer tax-free retail products for international visitors). “Being a foreign-born citizen, I said, I will be able to do this. I can do this. I can speak the language. Retail store to retail store.”

Just so happens, the tax-free shopping office was within the Visit Baton Rouge building. As time went by and Bordelon made friends within the building, she was a known entity when a job opening became available and a she says, “The rest is history.”

Now, after 24 years, she is an experienced player on the team and she loves what she does. “I do love it,” Bordelon said. “We’ve been there so long and we’ve become so close. (I’ve) become like a big sister for a lot of younger adults who have been in the industry a long time. It’s just painful for me to see some of them lose their jobs.”

Despite the earlier damage to business, there have been some recent upticks in local groups interested in meetings. “We have been doing some site visits. Hotels are opening back up,” said Bordelon who said they’ve done a good job landing future business as well. “Fortunately I guess in Baton Rouge, being a smaller city, the impact for those large 5 or 6,000 (people meeting) that weren’t happening weren’t in Baton Rouge. So we were able to keep and sustain the smaller meetings.”

Notes: Bordelon received her Bachelors of Marketing and Management from Loyola University New Orleans and her Masters from University of Louisiana Monroe. She helped charter the Louisiana Chapter of the Society of Government Meeting Professionals in 2008. She is married with two young adult sons.

Honors: Rising Star of the Year, Gulf States Chapter of MPI; Supplier of the Year, Louisiana Society of Association Executives; Distinguished Sales Award, Baton Rouge Sales and Marketing Executives.

Hobbies: Cooking, gardening, traveling

Favorite Movie: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (w/Jim Carrey)