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Meeting of the minds
Inclusive narratives, a post-pandemic restaurant industry and artificial intelligence are just a few of the topics that will feature in this year’s VA1 Governor’s Tourism Summit, an annual gathering of tourism professionals from across the state and beyond.
Scheduled Nov. 13-15, the 2024 VA1 Governor’s Tourism Summit will take place at Hot Springs’ The Omni Homestead Resort, which officially reopened last fall after $150 million in renovations. Last year’s summit took place at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.
“It‘s really just a chance for the entire industry, suppliers and vendors to come together for networking and sharing the most relevant ideas, technology and concepts for 2024, looking to 2025 and beyond,” says Rita McClenny, president and CEO of the Virginia Tourism Corp.
Attendees and around 60 listed guest speakers will get the opportunity to discuss such ideas during the three-day event. Organizers say they expect strong attendance this year — approximately 450 state tourism professionals and Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick.
“Tourism has grown,” says Eric Terry, president of the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association. “Tourism is growing at a pretty good clip. We’re anticipating that growth to continue in the current year.”
Virginia’s visitor spending in 2023 reached a record high of $33.3 billion, an increase of nearly 10% from the year prior. The industry also supported 13,000 more jobs in 2023 — more than 224,000 jobs total — compared with 2022.
The summit will kick off Nov. 13 with networking events and a reception themed around the 20th anniversary of The Crooked Road, Southwest Virginia’s 333-mile driving trail connecting more than 60 venues related to traditional Appalachian old time and bluegrass music.
The day after is when the summit will commence its opening general session. Keynote speakers include Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the National Restaurant Association’s research and knowledge group, and Hilina Ajakaiye, executive vice president of Meet Boston.
“Despite a host of challenges this year, restaurant industry sales nationwide will reach a record $1.1 trillion,” Riehle says. For the commonwealth of Virginia, he says, 2023 sales were well over $27 billion.
The pandemic shook up numerous in-person activities for much of 2020 and 2021, including eating out at restaurants. And these drastic adjustments for the consumer and the industry have fundamentally altered routines today, Riehle says.
“If you look at restaurant traffic today, across all meal periods, industry traffic is still down for on-site visits compared to pre-pandemic levels,” he explains. “Conversely, what the industry calls off-premises traffic — take-out, delivery, drive-through and curbside — for all three meal periods is up compared to what it was pre-pandemic.”
Almost three-quarters of all U.S. restaurant traffic today is off-premises, a sharp hike from 61% before the pandemic, according to Riehle.
Throughout the summit will be a number of “super sessions,” where presenters each cover a different aspect of the tourism industry. Diversity, equity and inclusion, as it relates to tourism marketing and hospitality, will be center stage at a couple of sessions.
According to the event description, OutCoast.com publisher and LGBTQ+ travel content creator Rachel Covello’s session aims to “[explore] the shift in tourism marketing from emphasizing destination aesthetics to prioritizing emotional and mental safety, particularly for minority groups.”
Although leisure travel recovered after the pandemic in 2021, group travel — defined as people traveling together for some organization, shared purpose or agenda — took a couple more years to rebound, says Dan Roberts, vice president of research and strategy for VTC.
“If you look at overall the recovery of the commonwealth going back to 2020, business and group [travel] have had the highest hill to climb,” he says.
Roberts will take part in three sessions during the summit about the hotel industry, group business, success metrics and the group and meetings market in Virginia.
Also on the agenda is artificial intelligence, a growing influence in tourism.
Nov. 15’s schedule will start with a general session, where Todd Brook, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Envisionit, will speak about how to use AI tools to increase team efficiency and productivity.
The summit’s exhibit hall opens Nov. 14 and will feature myriad exhibitors from both in- and out-of-state, including Amtrak Virginia, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Disney Advertising, LeisureMedia360, Tripadvisor and the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission (VA250).
“It is an opportunity to update especially our tourism professionals from across the state on new things that are happening, things that are new to the industry as well as some statistical updates on what’s happening from a data point of view,” Terry says.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected from the print version to reflect that Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick will be at the event, not Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Raleigh-to-Richmond rail project gains steam
Preliminary construction is underway for the Richmond-to-Raleigh passenger rail project, an estimated 162-mile route along the defunct CSX Transportation S-Line corridor that will speed up travel between the capitals of North Carolina and Virginia, as well as Washington, D.C., and the Northeast U.S.
“We have basically funded work to advance all of the preliminary engineering from downtown Richmond to downtown Raleigh,” says Jason Orthner, rail division director for the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
In December 2023, the project was awarded a $1 billion U.S. Department of Transportation grant, coupled with 20% funding matches from NCDOT and Amtrak.
With the first 18 miles of rail between Raleigh and Wake Forest now fully funded, construction has begun on the first grade separation at Durant Road in Raleigh, where an overhead highway bridge is replacing an at-grade railroad crossing so vehicle and train traffic can move at different heights rather than intersecting. The milestone was celebrated this summer at an event attended by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
With a design speed of 110 miles per hour, the new route is expected to cut travel time from Richmond to Raleigh — currently a minimum of 3.5 hours by rail and 2.5 hours by car — down to two hours.
“We’re really excited about the opportunity. The Raleigh-Durham metropolitan area is already one of our top five visitor origin markets,” says Katherine O’Donnell, president and CEO of Richmond Region Tourism. “So, any time there’s an easier or more seamless way for visitors to get here, we feel like that’s an opportunity for growth of tourism and business travel.”
Most visitors from North Carolina currently travel to Richmond by car, says O’Donnell. The new rail line isn’t likely to affect airport travel, according to Troy Bell, director of marketing and air service development for the Capital Region Airport Commission.
“Reliable rail between Richmond/Petersburg and Raleigh seems more likely to pull a few people off interstate highways than anything else,” Bell says.
The $6 billion to $7 billion project could be complete as early as the mid-2030s, Orthner says, but that timeline is heavily dependent on funding, particularly at the federal level.
“Building 162 miles of railroad takes time,” he says. “We hope to see some of these initial projects, including the grade separation of the first segment of track, start to come online in the next two to three years.”
VCEDA seed grants sow small business growth
Adam Patterson knew if his fashion design company was going to thrive in his hometown of Big Stone Gap, he needed capital — and a new sewing machine.
“Mine was so old, it sewed crooked stitches,” says Patterson, founder of Jones-Hurst Designs.
Patterson received a $10,000 grant in September from a Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority program that has been a boon for entrepreneurs in a seven-county corner of Southwest Virginia. The money allowed him to buy a shiny new Husqvarna Viking Designer Epic 2 sewing machine, on which he sews custom-made clothing out of recycled denim. It also allowed him to move his business from weekly pop-up locations to a storefront.
Since launching in 2017, VCEDA‘s Seed Capital Matching Fund has awarded $1.8 million to 194 startups, creating nearly 700 jobs in locally owned businesses across varying fields, including restaurants, coffee shops and businesses providing services like drone photography or leatherworking. Grants are geared to startups in manufacturing, alternative energy, information technology, construction trades and tourism.
“We felt like this was the missing component in economic development,” says Jonathan Belcher, VCEDA’s executive director. “There were no grant programs to spur small business growth in the region.”
More than 90% of the businesses survive their first two years, well above the national rate.
The program’s economic impact has been notable. A 2021 study conducted by Virginia Tech researchers found that VCEDA’s first $1 million in local seed capital funding generated $34.2 million in economic impact. Additionally, the program delivered $9.4 million in wages.
Applicants for the grants first work with the Small Business Development Centers at Mountain Empire and Southwest Virginia community colleges to develop business plans, conduct market research and come up with matching funds in the form of cash, loans or equity. Individual grants are capped at $10,000.
When Henry Morris lost his job in wholesale food sales during the pandemic, he and his wife, Renee, used a $6,500 seed grant to open Henry’s Produce and Market in Duffield. The funding helped them purchase a walk-in refrigerated cooler where they store apples, peaches and other produce in bulk. The business has grown from one employee to six.
“We work six days a week, and they are long, hard days,” Renee Morris says. “I ask Henry all the time if he’d like to go back to his old job, and he says, ‘Not a chance.’”
Defense tech startups close major funding rounds
Venture capital firms are betting big on two Northern Virginia-based defense contracting startups that are promising high-tech solutions to military challenges. In August, McLean-based Defcon AI announced it had raised $44 million in seed funding led by San Francisco investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners. The same month, Parry Labs in Alexandria raised $80 million in its first institutional funding round, led by Capitol Meridian Partners.
That both are headquartered in NoVa should come as no surprise, says Defcon AI CEO Yisroel Brumer, a quantum physicist who spent 15 years at the Pentagon before becoming a founding partner of Defcon AI’s parent tech incubator, Red Cell Partners. “The quality of senior leaders in the area is outstanding,” he says.
Red Cell launched Defcon AI in 2022 to address the Department of Defense’s need to field operational artificial intelligence at scale to maintain advantages on the battlefield. Defcon’s first product is Artiv, an operational mission planner for contested logistics environments.
“There is a challenge integrating real operational defense expertise with real revolutionary software engineering. There’s a lot of organizations that have one of those two things. Very few organizations have both of them,” Brumer says. “And that’s what Defcon was really stood up to do: to bring in four-star generals, operators, people who deeply understand defense operations and the kind of revolutionary software engineering you see in Silicon Valley and create a culture where the two could talk to each other, which is actually the hard part and where the pain is.”
Meanwhile, Parry Labs was co-founded in 2015 by defense sector veteran-turned-entrepreneur John “JD” Parkes, who previously worked as airborne mission lead in the DOD’s Office of Strategic Capabilities.
“We wanted to make integrating and installing and implementing new software and systems on military applications significantly cheaper and faster. Today we call that or call ourselves a digital system integrator,” Parkes says. “What we’re focused on is delivering zero-trust cybersecurity environments over-the-air updates, really good standardization of data, and then easy accessibility to these environments for mission and safety critical environments.”
The two companies are contributing to a record-breaking year in which defense tech startups in the U.S. raised $2.5 billion by August, according to data from Crunchbase.com. That figure surpasses the 2023 total of $2.1 billion and is on track to surpass 2022’s record high of $2.6 billion.
Roanoke City Council approves zoning changes — again
A residential zoning do-over in the Star City is done. At least for now.
On Sept. 16, Roanoke City Council voted 6-1 to adopt zoning amendments that will allow greater housing density and eliminate single-family-only housing
City Council adopted similar zoning amendments in March, but several city homeowners, including Republican mayoral candidate David Bowers and former City Attorney Bill Hackworth, filed a lawsuit charging that city officials did not follow proper procedures prior to the vote. The suit remains pending, according to Maynard Sipe, the plaintiffs’ attorney.
Roanoke officials responded to the lawsuit by starting over and reopened discussion on the matter through the summer. In August, Roanoke’s planning commission reversed course, opting by a 3-2 vote not to recommend the changes. But City Council, which isn’t bound by the commission’s vote, adopted the proposal at its September meeting following lengthy public comment.
Several Roanoke homeowners filed a second lawsuit Oct. 16 at Roanoke City Circuit Court charging that Roanoke City officials failed to provide a sufficient summary of the zoning amendments in public notices about public hearings for this round of zoning amendment adoption and other issues.
Roanoke isn’t alone in eliminating single-family zoning, according to Alexander von Hoffman, senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
“The idea is that by allowing demand to flow freely without the constriction of the zoning regulations, you’d be able to get increased housing … [and] produce more units that are less expensive,” von Hoffman says.
In September, a circuit judge overturned changes that eliminated single-family zoning in Arlington County, citing procedural issues and other problems. A lawsuit challenging Alexandria’s move to end single-family-only zoning appears headed for court.
Roanoke’s previous single-family-only residential zones were a holdover from the city’s Jim Crow era, according to acting Assistant City Manager Chris Chittum, who announced plans to retire in October. Paired with the city’s urban renewal projects that tore down historically Black neighborhoods to make way for Interstate 581, the civic center and a post office, Roanoke became one of the most segregated cities in America. “It‘s pretty insidious how well it’s worked,” Chittum says.
The rewritten zoning code makes it easier for developers to build multiunit parcels in residential neighborhoods. It also made other changes, including reducing the amount of lot area required for dwellings.
But don’t expect Roanoke to change drastically overnight. The city issued 98 residential building permits in 2023, and it expects to see fewer than 40 additional units annually following the changes.
“The way our housing market is,” he says, “every single unit that we add is helpful.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated from the print version.
Staying nimble
Cvent’s goal is “getting the friction” out of meeting and event planning, says McNeel Keenan, vice president of product management for the Tysons-based global event marketing and management company.
To do that, Cvent offers software products that handle registration, check-in, budgeting, marketing, speaker and exhibitor management for in-person, hybrid and virtual events. Hotels use tools such as Cvent Passkey to manage room blocks and Cvent Diagramming to manage multiple large events.
These products can streamline many time-consuming tasks, like responding to request for proposal (RFP) applicants, Keenan says. However, Cvent’s AI-powered tools “help craft a faster response,” he notes. Also, the company offers an annual user conference that includes training camps, tech tours and meetups.
This year marks Cvent’s 25th year in business. In 1999, CEO Reggie Aggarwal started the company with six employees, and it became profitable for the first time in 2004. Four years later, the company started the Cvent Supplier Network of venues. Then in 2013, Aggarwal took the company public, but in 2016, the company was purchased by Vista Equity Partners and taken private again.
With the pandemic came an important shift for all meeting planners and other industry professionals, including those at Cvent. The company began hosting virtual and hybrid events on a new virtual event platform launched in August 2020, and at the end of 2021, it went public for the second time. At the end of 2023, Cvent had about 4,800 employees and 22,000 customers worldwide, and it was back to in-person events.
And the deals weren’t yet done; in 2023, private equity firm Blackstone purchased Cvent for $4.6 billion, and in 2024, Cvent made several significant purchases.
In January the company acquired Jifflenow, which schedules and manages B2B appointments, and iCapture, which captures website visitor information for leads.
In June, it acquired Reposite to power the Cvent Vendor Marketplace, a network of more than 40,000 vendor offerings.
And in September, Cvent bought Splash, an event marketing technology company that Keenan says is geared to “simpler, field marketing events,” such as lunches, dinners and parties that take place alongside larger trade shows.
Smooth sailing
Aggarwal said in a statement that the company’s M&A strategy is driven by customers, “and we hear all the time that our customers want one platform, seamless data flow and an improved attendee and customer experience. Each of our recent acquisitions has been a strategic move to address these needs and expand our capabilities to better support our tens of thousands of customers.”
Organizations want the flexibility to run a mix of formats and event types, which optimizes their budgets, “something that is even more compelling in an uncertain or challenging macroeconomic environment,” according to Aggarwal.
Artificial intelligence is the next frontier in events management, “but candidly, I think we’re still a ways away from seeing what it can really do for our industry,” he says. “Cvent focuses on the practical application of AI across its platform because we want to make it easy for all of our customers to harness the power of AI in their day-to-day lives.”
The company has already rolled out
20 AI-related initiatives — including predictive modeling for registration planning, personalization tools, AI-powered event diagramming and chatbots.
In-person events continue to be the priority, Aggarwal says. The reason is simple, he added: 65% of planners say in-person events are more valuable to their stakeholders now when compared with 2019.
“That said, virtual events and hybrid events are still core aspects of a successful total event program,” Aggarwal notes.
Coming out of the pandemic, Keenan says, organizers have learned that a hybrid event can require the work of running both a virtual event and an in-person one.
As a result, “ambitions are pared back,” he says. “Now planners are making the conscious decisioning to dial it back a bit. They’re thinking of their budget. People are asking what makes sense, and so we’re seeing more balance.”
Since the pandemic, organizers also have learned that “people now expect the content to be recorded. You can capture it and get more value,” he says.
Zero to 60
CAIS, a New York-based alternative investment platform for independent financial advisers, “has gone from zero to 60” using Cvent products, according to Andrew DePaul, its senior vice president of marketing.
“Our first event with Cvent three years ago was basically a trial run, an internal meeting in Brooklyn,” DePaul says, but there was plenty of work on the line, because CAIS held more than 100 events in 2022.
So far, DePaul says Cvent’s products have helped boost attendance at its 2022 and 2023 Alternative Investment Summit; the third summit was scheduled in October, and “I think we will break records,” DePaul says.
What helps event planners break attendance records is what Keenan calls the “bespoke experience” Cvent offers. The big thing, he says “is to enable organizers to personalize the experience” for each attendee.
In CAIS’s case, the Attendee Hub app, which connects attendees to all the content, networking and sponsors the event has to offer, is especially helpful, according to DePaul. “Through Hub’s one-on-one feature, people can see everybody else attending. They can connect and have a meeting on their own. We’ve ramped it up and we’re seeing better engagement. We definitely will be all-in again next year.”
CAIS is making plans to take its summit on the road and has been hosting smaller scale events such as round table dinners. Cvent’s products are useful for small events — and for small businesses, DePaul says. “They’re good at working with you, so you’re buying the things you need. You don’t have to do a whole package.”
Two products coming online soon are aimed at smaller users, such as nonprofit organizations.
Cvent Essentials, which is in beta, is a pared down version of the Cvent platform that is designed for occasional users and has templates to support various types of meetings with different support and resources.
Also in the works is Event in a Box, a check-in and badging program that can be used for events with up to 250 attendees.
Cvent’s wide variety of products was on display at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in southern France.
No, Keenan says, “we were not running the film festival itself,” but big sponsors such as Spotify and TikTok find new markets for themselves at Cannes by “running their own events on the side.” That’s where Cvent comes in.
Convention centers
Energy storage projects slated for Greensville, Pittsylvania
Two energy storage projects proposed for Southern Virginia would help augment the area’s power capacity, diversify the region’s tax base and boost the regional economy, industry representatives say.
Dominion Energy Virginia wants to build a liquified natural gas storage facility on more than 20 acres that the Richmond-based Fortune 500 utility owns next to its Greensville County natural gas power plant, straddling the line with Brunswick County, according to a June filing with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. The $548 million facility, which would open in late 2027, would employ 400 construction-related workers and culminate in six full-time jobs, bringing $17.5 million to the local economy, and boosting combined county tax revenues by $35.5 million over 25 years, according to Dominion.
The storage facility would provide backup fuel supply for Dominion’s Greensville and Brunswick power stations during periods of extreme weather or peak demand, enough to power 700,000 homes in the region for up to four days, says Dominion spokesperson Jeremy Slayton. He points to Winter Storm Elliot, which in December 2022 knocked out power for millions of electricity customers along the Eastern Seaboard, as well an early 2021 deep freeze in Texas that led to hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses.
“We see those types of incidents happening, and we know that we can’t allow that to happen for our customers,” Slayton says.
Separately, in July, North Carolina-based Strata Clean Energy received approval from the Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Authority to lease 85 acres at the 3,528-acre Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill to build a lithium-ion battery storage facility on an up-to-4-acre pad that would connect to an Appalachian Power substation.
Strata Director of Development Adam Thompson says the project, which would employ only a handful of workers, is in a “holding pattern” while economic development officials work to attract other customers to Berry Hill, but construction could start in 2026.
Although both projects won’t create many permanent jobs, those positions will likely be well-paying for the region, says Bryan David, program director for the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Localities in Southern Virginia are working “as hard as [they] can to transform the economy” by diversifying their tax bases, he says, and “these types of investments are incrementally one more step toward that goal.”
Construction begins on Carilion Taubman Cancer Center
Of the donors, health professionals and area leaders who turned out for Wednesday’s groundbreaking for the Carilion Taubman Cancer Center, Orion Moses, age 9, commanded the most attention.
Doctors diagnosed Moses, who lives in Elliston, with leukemia at age 5. After enduring three and a half years of chemotherapy, he is now cancer free.
“I think that the people at Carilion and the clinic are very kind,” he told the crowd who gathered under a tent on the Virginia Tech Carilion Health Sciences and Technology Campus in Roanoke on Wednesday. “They took really good care of me … I am really glad they get this new building. I know it will help other patients fight and win.”
Carilion has raised $74 million toward its $100 million fundraising goal for the cancer center set to be completed in 2027, Nancy Howell Agee, Carilion’s CEO emeritus, announced Wednesday.
Former Advance Auto Parts CEO Nicholas Taubman, a past U.S. ambassador to Romania, and his wife, Jenny, gave $25 million to the project, which will bear their name.
Carilion employees raised an additional $1 million for the building, following in the footsteps of Agee, who, along with her husband, Steve, kicked off fundraising for the effort with a $1 million gift in 2019.
As Agee showed off a rendering of the facility to Wednesday’s attendees, she noted her brain doesn’t work in feet or yards.
“People say to me, ‘How big is it going to be?’ I say, ‘Well, big enough,’” said Agee, who was succeeded by Steve Arner as president and CEO of Carilion Clinic at the beginning of October.
Big enough, it turns out, is a six-story building.
HDR, an employee-owned design firm with headquarters in Nebraska, worked with Carilion oncology teams to design the 257,000-square-foot building, which Agee described as “innovative” and “easy for patients to access.” The facility, she added, will provide “a beautiful environment for collaboration, hope and healing.”
An illuminated staircase, visible from I-581, will be lit up in different colors to signify different types of cancers.
“For instance, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and our beacon, if it was here today, would be shining pink,” Agee explained.
Currently, Carilion treats about 3,500 patients for different forms of cancer each year, according to the health system.
The Carilion Taubman Cancer Center will replace a 41-year-old building on South Jefferson Street. Blue Ridge Cancer Care, which partners with Carilion to provide medical and radiation oncology services at the existing facility, will continue to provide care in the new facility.
“Beautiful buildings are important, but it’s what each of you do, who work in this building, that makes all the difference,” Agee said.
The goal, Agee said, is for the new cancer center to be named a National Cancer Institute-Designated Cancer Center, a designation for facilities that “meet rigorous standards for transdisciplinary, state-of-the-art research focused on developing new and better approaches to preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer.”
The new facility should allow for more patients to be treated. Carilion’s oncology program will expand to include new services, including nurse navigators who will work to shorten the time between a patient’s cancer diagnosis and treatment.
The center will also bring advanced technology, clinical trials and medical practitioners of different disciplines to a single location, according to the health system.
Agee noted that Virginia Tech is deepening its commitment to cancer research. “Together, we’re advancing care and research, while also driving important economic development throughout our region and the Commonwealth,” she said.
Del. Terry Austin, R-Botetourt, was among the attendees at Wednesday’s service.
“It’s a great day in the Valley,” said Austin, who also sits on the Carilion Clinic Board of Directors. When Austin was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2018, he received treatment through Carilion Clinic, the University of Virginia and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
From his experience, Austin said he saw firsthand that Carilion and Blue Ridge Cancer Care have professionals with the skills to fight cancer. “We just need the proper facility to do it in,” he said.