Webster Parish is part of the Louisiana North package that will be presented to travelers from all over the world next week during the International Pow Wow, presented by the National Travelers Association, in New Orleans.
Executive Director Lynn Dorsey, with the Webster Parish Convention and Visitors Bureau, will travel to New Orleans Saturday as part of the welcoming committee and in the following days will be talking to people from all over the world about Webster Parish and north Louisiana.
“I will be representing the Interstate 20 corridor – Shreveport, Bossier, Minden, Ruston and Monroe,” she said, adding other areas to be included are Natchitoches, Toledo Bend and Alexandria.
Dorsey has appointments with people from all over the world from China, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Japan, Italy, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Germany, just to name a few.
“We are packaging itineraries that we will be handing out to these people to bring them to our area,” she said. “We will be marketing Webster Parish in combination with Shreveport-Bossier, and we will be packaging them to where they will fly into Dallas, and now there is a direct flight from Germany to New Orleans. And we just found out that we can package it for them to come from New Orleans and drive up Interstate 49 to come our way.”
She says people she has talked with have already seen places such as New York, and they want to see how Americans live.
“One of the things that we’re really going to push is the fact that they’ve already been to New York City, they’ve already been to New Orleans, they’ve been to all those kinds of places,” she said. “So, we’re going to offer them what we think is what they really want to see, and that’s off the beaten path. We’ve got all these unique things in north Louisiana that they can experience, and we have an itinerary planned for them so they can go at their own pace and see how people live in America.”
The IPW will be from Saturday, through Wednesday, June 22, at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The theme for the convention is “Bringing the World to America.” IPW is the travel industry’s premier international marketplace and the largest generator of travel to the U.S., officials with the U.S. Travel Association said.
IPW will have more than 1,100 exhibitor booths held by U.S. Suppliers of USA travel products and destinations and more than 5,000 attendees who are international travel buyers, domestic travel buyers and international journalists representing more than 70 countries.