­­After nearly 12 years as executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, Steve Richer retired in November. During 30 years in the tourism industry, he'd led the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Authority, the Nevada Commission on Tourism, and the New Jersey Division of Travel and Tourism. In December, he started work as a consultant to the National Tour Association.

What do you consider your biggest accomplishment?
From a straight marketing sense, when I came here this area pretty much wasn't known outside of Mississippi and the immediate environs, even though the casinos were here. We introduced the area to the national market and media and had phenomenal success, helping stimulate more hotel development, golf courses, and more flights. When I got here, several of the casinos had no hotel rooms. There was no jet service at all - now we're up to nine airlines. We had a steady stream of meeting and exhibition planners coming to the coast. We were well on our way to becoming a premier destination when the hurricane hit. I think we did very well - everything looked really wonderful.

That's one way to look at it. The other is to look at the last two years.

I'm guessing the time since Katrina has been your most challenging.
It's one of the biggest challenges anyone could face - how you build back a destination that just suffered a hit from the worst natural catastrophe in the history of the United States. We went from 17,500 rooms to 3,000 rooms. We lost our attractions, a lot of air service, restaurants, residences, offices. We lost our funding because our county commissioners had to put everything toward emergencies. That meant we had to rely on room tax, but with no rooms, there was no room tax. We went into an interesting time period: Eventually all but two of our staff were assigned to work in emergency agencies.

What did that mean mission-wise?
We've spent the last two years rebuilding a destination almost from scratch. In the beginning, we really changed our focus from advertising and marketing to getting the word out about what was going on here and strategically encouraging voluntourism. In March 2006, Tourism Cares for Tomorrow came here and worked on 10 different projects in two days. They slept in tents and army barracks because there were no hotel rooms - this is a group that would normally stay in upscale hotels. More than 300 of them worked cleaning beaches, painting, and re-seeding. People were in shock because it looked like it had been bombed. Mississippi started working on recovery at the same time they were finding food, water, and medical care for people.

How long were you in limbo with staff scattered to other agencies?
From September to January. We had many interesting things happen, one of them being our former director of marketing spent several months as the de facto deputy coroner. She went from working on advertising to finding corpses and trying to help identify them.

We spent a year in FEMA trailers with a full staff, so you couldn't lean your chair back or you'd hit the people behind you. We've been in the former Harris headquarters here for about a year - the Gulf Coast Business Council and Community Foundation took over the building and a lot of previously homeless agencies came here. We're almost back to working on things like convention sales.

What's convention space like now?
We had a lot of meeting space in hotels, but it became obvious that casinos weren't going to build gaming space over the water anymore. The governor and legislature changed laws so casinos could be 800 feet away from mean high tide - essentially the sea wall - so a lot of them moved their gaming space into what was meeting space. Meeting space went away for a while. But the Beau Rivage kept its casino on the water and kept its meeting space, and the IP Casino Resort Spa survived much better than anyone else. It's expanding its convention space, and others will put it back in over a period of time.

What would you consider your greatest moments?
There have been some spectacular things like marketing successes and recognitions, but from a personal standpoint and a community standpoint, I can't help but say the outpouring of support when the nation rallied to help us. I spent most of my days in 2005 and early 2006 dealing with people who were coming to help and making plans, finding them volunteer work, going around with them, saying farewell to them. In tourism we always talk about what we've achieved, but having been through Hurricane Katrina and finding out you can lose stuff and work from a chair and live in a trailer, you also find out what really matters is people.

When folks look at the cynicism that has developed around national politics, with everyone wondering why there's such a great division, down here you could see people from every background you could imagine showing up when nobody asked them, coming with tools and mops and bleach and food, setting up camp and helping everyone. They brought the No. 1 thing we needed: hope. It was the most amazing experience of my life.

Let me talk about one thing we did. The newspaper here asked people to tell them of any groups who came and helped. They ran 10 pages of lists of organizations. We took that list and grouped those organizations by locations - they came from all 50 states - and we figured out where the daily newspapers were in all those markets. We wrote a letter to the editor for those papers saying thank you and particularly thanking those groups. We wrote to 900 newspapers. It dwarfs anything else I could talk about.

You can appeal to people intellectually, and maybe it gets to them a little. But when you get to them emotionally, they leave their hearts with you. They gave their time and their prayers and worked with their own hands. We know we had at least half a million volunteers come down, but it was probably closer to a million.

Any regrets?
Anything you'd have done differently? I feel very satisfied that this place challenged me in every way that I was prepared to be challenged.

How else are you spending your time now?
My first full month in Washington as a consultant will be in December. I'm keeping my house in Gulfport because I love it, and I'll be living in Alexandria while at work in D.C. I'll go to New York as well, working with industry relations, government relations, financial analysts, national tourism offices. I get to work on a lot of things on the national level.

What do you see­­ for the future of the industry?
I think there are going to be increasing challenges because we're an increasingly global industry. You put together all the new technology, the blogosphere, YouTube, and people are going to have so many ways to find out where they want to go and to find unbiased opinions. There are going to be big questions about how destination marketing associations can morph into a role where they can compete with the mass of information now available.

What advice would you give those who are hitting their stride in the industry?
Have fun, make sure your staff has fun, and make sure your partners have fun. And, remember, that's what your customers want, too. I was a much more policy-oriented, business-oriented person when I first came here. I met a man, Billy Creel, who was kind of the personification of Gulf Coast hospitality. He always wore golf shirts. One day he said, "Why are you wearing a suit? It's a resort - look like you're in a resort. And don't always talk business. I have a family. Don't you want to know how they're doing?" He said it in jest, but he was basically telling me to relax. That was in 1996, and he passed away several years ago. We just did some new research with a new ad agency and were looking for a new slogan, which turned out to be "Relax, it's the Mississippi Gulf Coast." It just occurred to me: It took ­­­us 12 years to get back to what he told me. He had it right all along.

Contributing Editor Ginny Phillips is a freelance writer in Birmingham, Ala.