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The annual meeting of the North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians has been described as a “family medicine tradition” — another reason to keep the event intact in Ashevllle.
For 35 years, the North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians (NCAFP) has convened its Winter Family Physicians Weekend at the Omni Grove Park Inn & Spa in Asheville — a four-day gathering that includes education sessions as well as a trade show with several hundred exhibiting companies. But for the 600-plus family physicians and health-care providers who usually attend, many of whom bring their families, it’s more than just a chance to earn CME credits. It’s a reunion.
‘We call it a family medicine tradition.’
Kathryn Atkinson, CMP, director of CME and events, North Carolina Academy of Family Physicians
“We call it a family medicine tradition,” said Kathryn Atkinson, CMP, director of CME and events, who has worked for the organization for 19 years. “The year when I started, there were people there who brought their children. Now those children are bringing their kids.”
So, it’s understandable that after Hurricane Helene swept through the Western North Carolina region on Sept. 27, causing significant infrastructure damage, flooding, and landslides — just 68 days prior to their 2024 event, scheduled for Dec. 4-8 — the NCAFP team hesitated to cancel. As a North Carolinian familiar with Asheville, Atkinson knew canceling would be a blow to the community. Tourism accounts for 15 percent of employment in the Asheville metro area. The fall, in particular, is prime tourism season, accounting for a quarter of the state’s annual visits. Helene essentially erased that revenue stream for the region, not just for hotels and meeting venues like the Omni, but for many of the locally owned small businesses that tourists come to patronize, from the art studios that fill the popular River Arts District to the homegrown breweries and cideries and James Beard Award-winning restaurants that fill downtown Asheville and beyond.
“The last thing we wanted to do was to move that meeting,” Atkinson said. Even after she scrolled through online forums filled with posts from planners discussing canceling their events in Asheville, she said she and her team wanted to hold “steady and fast.” Not only because the event is something her attendees look forward to every year, but because it would be one of the first to return to Asheville since the storm, bringing much-needed business to the area.
Sticking with the event as planned meant that Atkinson and her team would have to navigate some tough logistical challenges. Water hadn’t yet been completely restored to the Omni, where NCAFP had bought out nearly 80 percent of the property for their group. And another overflow hotel in their room block unexpectedly became unavailable due to an extension of a contract to house displaced locals and first responders. Luckily, both were resolved in time. Water service was restored just days ahead of their event’s kick-off, and the overflow hotel had an alternative property already confirmed when the hotel’s staff called to break the news. “The way that it all worked out was a miracle,” Atkinson said, adding that it turned out to be one of the best annual meetings they’ve ever had.
‘The last thing we wanted to do was to move that meeting. The way that it all worked out was a miracle,’’ said Kathryn Atkinson.
Not so Uncommon
The dilemma Atkinson faced may become a more frequent occurrence for event organizers. Severe weather events are increasing in both number and intensity, worldwide. This means events are more likely than ever to coincide with extreme weather, whether it be an unseasonal heat wave or a hurricane. That puts organizers in a tenuous position: cancel, which can be costly, or keep moving forward.
Despite the logistical hurdles, if it’s safe and feasible to do so, keeping the event in place according to plan can be an opportunity for groups to leave a profound impact on a community when they need it most, as Atkinson found. “These banquet people, these housekeepers, these reservation teams, they had been out of work since Sept. 27 — and they’re hourly,” she said of the Omni staff. “But the look on their faces and the look in their eyes — they were so happy that we were back.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Explore Asheville, the CVB partner Atkinson leaned on heavily, which had launched messaging in November encouraging visitors to return to areas like downtown that did not sustain major damage, once water was restored and major roads had reopened.
To support the Asheville community, NCAFP strongly encouraged attendees to get out and about after sessions wrapped every afternoon. Open businesses had placed flags out front — a tip Explore Asheville shared with Atkinson, who promoted logistical details like these to attendees well in advance, she said, to help retain attendance and quash assumptions that Asheville would be completely shut down.
“When we talked to the CVB and said, ‘What do you need? What can we do?’” Atkinson said, “They were like, ‘Don’t send me bottled water. Don’t bring me bags of clothes. We need money in the worst way. Our people need to work. Please come to our town just as you normally would. Maybe the trees aren’t so pretty right now, and maybe the roads are a little muddy, but it’s all good.’”
Painting Perceptions
Combatting misperceptions and even misinformation is another hurdle for organizers, one that DMOs are increasingly helping to correct by launching advertising campaigns pointedly setting the record straight and positioning themselves as go-to, trusted resources for consolidated updates.
“Painting perceptions with a very wide brush” has repercussions, said Victoria Isley, president and CEO of Visit Asheville, referring to how some areas in Western North Carolina lost visitor dollars even though they were unaffected by the storm. Even within a single neighborhood, she said, you can find drastically different situations.
“There are parts of the River Arts District, what we call the Upper River Arts District, that are open and functioning and operational with art galleries and restaurants and hotels,” Isley told Convene in April. Then “there are parts of the Lower River Arts District which are now in permitting and putting themselves back together for a planned reopening later this summer.”
This is a familiar scenario in Los Angeles, where the second- and third-most destructive wildfires in California’s history razed parts of the Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and other L.A. communities earlier this year.
‘We spent two weeks fighting wildfires and two months fighting misperceptions.’
Adam Burke, president and CEO of LA Tourism
Visit California performed a sentiment study shortly after the wildfires revealing that the average American traveler believed that 40 percent of the region had been damaged by fires. In reality, it was less than 2 percent. “By no means, that’s not meant to diminish how catastrophic it was for those communities that were impacted,” said Adam Burke, president and CEO of LA Tourism. “I had the chance to do an aerial survey,” he told Convene, “and it’s hard to wrap your brain around it. But the reality is, those are predominantly residential communities, so the visitor experience was largely unaffected. But the farther out you got from L.A., people were just seeing what they saw on the news. And so the way I like to describe it is: We spent two weeks fighting wildfires and two months fighting misperceptions.”
Providing accurate information, Burke said, is “one of the critical roles of a DMO,” and something he points to as the reason why his team didn’t see a single citywide event cancel due to the wildfires. That includes the Society of Thoracic Surgeons’ Annual Meeting, Americas Lodging Investment Summit, and the Grammy Awards, all of which took place on schedule, during or immediately following the wildfires.
“We were able to show them that Downtown L.A. was completely unaffected by the fires,” even in terms of air quality, Burke said. He also emphasized to those groups that the best way “people could support L.A. through this was to continue bringing their business to Los Angeles.”
Following the Same Notes
The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), which held its 2025 show in Anaheim on Jan. 21-25, also made a point of communicating why it was safe for its 63,000 attendees to convene. Even though its host venue, the Anaheim Convention Center (ACC), sat 60 miles away from the wildfires, some of which were still ablaze during NAMM’s show dates, some exhibitors and attendees voiced concerns over hosting the five-day event, which bills itself as the largest global gathering of the music industry.
‘If the data that we’re using makes it an obvious decision [to move forward], then exposing that data to all your attendees reduces negative commentary exponentially.’
John Mlynczak, president and CEO, National Association of Music Merchants
“For us, what we looked at is the data we were using to make the decision,” said John Mlynczak, president and CEO of NAMM. “The more we communicate that to people, when they see the data, the decision makes sense.” That included issuing multiple rounds of communications that preemptively answered common questions, including explaining that their location remained unaffected along with roads between L.A.-area airports and the ACC. They also included hyperlinks to data so that attendees could read for themselves updates from local fire departments, air-quality reports, and which hotels were being used for displaced local or emergency workers (none of which were within NAMM’s room blocks).
“People wanted to know that we had thought of everything,” Mlynczak said, adding that they probably received around 150 inquiries in the first two days of the wildfires. And “if the data that we’re using makes it an obvious decision [to move forward], then exposing that data to all your attendees reduces negative commentary exponentially.”
The fact that NAMM has taken place in Anaheim for 49 years, Mlynczak said, has given his team the benefit of having solid relationships on the ground, something they relied on heavily during the days leading up to the 2025 show. At one point when his team was fielding concerns from international attendees and exhibitors about air quality, even though they sent air-quality reports showing safe levels, NAMM organizers decided it would have more of an impact if they showed them.
That day, they organized a team on the ground, collaborating with representatives from the mayor’s office, the ACC, and area hotels to shoot a video showing that the air quality was normal. In the end, only one exhibitor canceled out of more than 1,850 in total. “All of that happened because of strong relationships,” Mlynczak said.
Making a Difference
A week ahead of the show, NAMM created the 2025 LA Wildfires Relief Fund to leverage the opportunity to make a positive impact. “We knew from the early communication with exhibitors and attendees” that even though it was safe to hold the show, Mlynczak said, there was a question of being “tone deaf” — as in, “we’re still gathering as a music products industry” when the wildfires affected areas where iconic studios are located. “Our musician community was affected. This wasn’t just a natural disaster that happened to be in the same area as us, this was a natural disaster that affected … the whole area.”
In fact, so many exhibitors and partners wanted to contribute to relief efforts that NAMM streamlined efforts into a centralized wildfire relief center. Working with partners like the Guitar Center Foundation and the Grammy Foundation, NAMM made the call for donations during the show by handing out brochures and posting QR codes at sessions. Not only did NAMM raise about $122,000 in total, every partner that contributed was recognized by the wildfire relief centers in their multiple on-site locations at the NAMM show.
Back in Asheville, Mosaix Group owner and CEO Melissa Murray also has seen interest from groups who want to make difference. “I’m happy to report that we’re serving lots of clients,” she said of her company, an accredited DMC specializing in managing corporate events and meetings in the Asheville area as well as other cities in the Carolinas. So far, she has organized river cleanups, clothing drives, and other kinds of volunteer opportunities for her clients with local nonprofits like Manna Food Bank. But she also has created more specialized experiences that capitalize on Asheville’s unique character — like an artisan fair, staffed by local artists from the city’s River Arts District, held during a group’s reception.
“We have had several groups say, ‘This is the best event we’ve ever had,’” Murray said. “And it’s because they’re part of the recovery. They see that them being in Asheville matters.”
Reputational Risks
According to a Destinations International research report, “Destination Reputation: Responding to Societal Issues,” which surveyed U.S. meeting planners and attendees in late 2024, one out of five planner respondents ranked weather and climate in the top three most important factors when asked what impacts their perception of a city’s reputation the most. In addition, around three out of five travelers surveyed ranked weather concerns — including excessive heat and risk of storms — as important or very important factors when deciding where they travel for meetings.
Jennifer N. Dienst is senior editor at Convene.
On the Web
- Take a closer look at what recovery was like for Asheville’s events industry in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
- See how one organizer navigated two crises at one meeting — a COVID surge and a hurricane.