New Orleans | Owen Organization

February 2019

Back in 2012 I was lucky enough to be invited on a Visit Florida media mission to Europe. The concept behind these missions is to educate the overseas media and tourism industry about all the great things to do in Florida. This trip included 10 tourism people representing destinations across the whole state. Most of the places were familiar to the Europeans – Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando for example – but the Northwest Florida Gulf Coast left most of the people we visited scratching their heads. In the end we developed a quick phrase to help them position us. “We’re in a different time zone than the rest of Florida; We’re closer to New Orleans than we are to Orlando; We eat grits (at least some of us do!) and we celebrate Mardi Gras”.

That last fact usually did the trick. The people on the other side of the ‘Pond’ were familiar with carnival in Venice, Italy and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. They knew about Fasching in Germany and even the UK has its ‘Pancake Day’! Everybody was aware of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but most didn’t know that Fat Tuesday is an event right along the Northern Gulf Coast.

The first Mardi Gras in North America happened in Mobile, Alabama in 1703. At that time Mobile was the capital of Louisiana and Frenchman Nicholas Langlois wanted to replicate the celebrations he was familiar with from his home in France.

New Orleans caught up some fifteen years later, and that’s the one that has got all the limelight more recently.

What’s this got to do with tourism? Well, not only is Mardi Gras along the coast an excuse to bring in tourists to our area, but its a great reason to do a bit of traveling yourself.

Some of the mystic societies or Krewes start their preparations for Mardi Gras in November and also stage New Year’s Eve balls. Others kick things off around twelfth night (January 6) with parades, balls and king cake parties.

Mardi Gras parades begin along the coast as early as January. Fort Walton Beach’s Mardi Gras Parade on Okaloosa Island seems to be aimed at the Snow Birds visiting from the north and brings color to the Emerald Coast. However, most of the Fat Tuesday activity really kicks off about two weeks before Mardi Gras itself. This year Fat Tuesday is March 5. Of course the actual date depends on when Easter falls so can be any time in the early part of the year.

As well as Mobile and New Orleans, parades and celebrations happen in Pensacola, Destin (in fact HarborWalk Village in Destin seem to have a Fat Tuesday parade every week, even in the summer!), Pensacola, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach in Alabama, and Biloxi in Mississippi. The whole of Louisiana celebrates Mardi Gras naturally, and balls and parades happen in Washington DC and Orlando too. Any excuse for a party!

What can the you and the tourists expect? Parades of course, with floats, outrageous costumes, moon pies and bead throwing. It’s said that Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the best free party on earth. Check on the internet for the parade schedules in your city of choice. Some restrict celebrations to March 5 alone, but Mobile and New Orleans have parades almost daily in the lead up to the the big day.

Each Krewe has it’s own theme and the members of the societies spend months working on their floats and costumes. There are the traditional Krewes like Bacchus, Endymion, Proteus and Orpheus, but also more off-the- wall societies like the Krewe of Chewbaccus which themes itself off the Star Wars character and the Krewe of Barkus, which is all about dogs, and the dogs march in the parade! They’re all well worth seeing.

And course there are the Mardi Gras Indians. These are based on Native American Indians and are more correctly referred to as Tribes, rather than Krewes. The costumes that the Indians wear are magnificent and take all year to create. The costumes are so lavish that there’s a museum in NOLA dedicated just to them.

Talking of museums, New Orleans have quite a number dedicated to Mardi Gras and the associated culture. They are something else to include in your visit planning.

No matter where you’re planning on visiting to celebrate Mardi Gras, food is an important part of the event. The whole idea of Fat Tuesday, no matter where in the world it’s being celebrated, is to finish off all the ‘fat’ food in the house before the fasting of Lent. The King Cake is the embodiment of this, being rich and invariably fattening. The origin of the cake goes back to Christian festival of Epiphany (January 6, or Twelfth Night) when the Magi, or three kings, visited the Christ Child. Buried inside the cake is a small figure. This in itself was based on a tradition from the Roman feast of Saturnalia – it all gets VERY complicated. Anyway, if you find the ‘king’ figure, you have to supply the next cake, so beware!

If you’re involved in tourism, tell all your guests about Mardi Gras along the Gulf Coast. You’ll be doing them a favor. And for you? It’s a great excuse to party.

A dilemma for NOLA

A recent article in a newspaper, The Economist, highlighted the changes that are happening in New Orleans. The Crescent City is local to Northwest Florida in that its only a four hour drive away and the culture (Mardi Gras for example) and cuisine of the City, and Louisiana in general heavily influence the Northern Gulf Coast. It can be said that Northwest Florida is closer in temperament an culture to NOLA, than it is to the rest of Florida. Orlando, which many international travelers see as ‘Florida’ is after all a six hour drive away and shares little in culture with the Panhandle.

The gist of The Economist article, which you can read HERE, is that the Mayor

and administration is attempting clean up the city’s act. New Orleans is famous for (admittedly among many other things) the free wheeling nature of the French Quarter in general and Bourbon Street in particular. Over recent years the French quarter has become a center for Bachelor and Bachelorette parties. Most of these at some stage gravitate towards the bars and music joints along Bourbon Street where they seek out the ‘genuine’ flavor of the old city.

Now the Mayor, understandably, wants to make sure that visitors are both safe and legal. There is a backlash against the cleanup with the slogan ‘Bourbon Street not Sesame Street’. As the article points out, some of the workers in the area question just how illegal the activities actually are and offer the suggestion that by changing the place, people may be put out of work or worse, moved into activities that really are beyond the pale.

Many years ago Bugis Street in Singapore had an equally salacious reputation. During the ‘50s and through to the ‘80s the street was famous for its nightly gatherings of the local transvestite population. It became one of Singapore’s main tourist attractions. Not somewhere one would recommend to your maiden aunt for a visit certainly, but it did contribute much to Singapore’s tourist attraction. Bugis Street is still there but was cleaned up during the ‘80s and ‘90s and is now one of the places famous for low cost clothes and a tourist attraction in in its own, new right.

From a tourism and moral point of view there can be no justification for illegal activities. However is there perhaps a very fine line to be trod between sanitizing and destroying? What would Las Vegas be without gambling for example.

A few years ago New York City decided to make Times Square more family friendly and threw out the dubious bars and entertainments. It doesn’t seem to have affected it’s ability to draw tourists although I would question if the area, particularly in the late evening is a place for visitors of a shall we say, a nervous disposition.

We visit New Orleans frequently and stay in the French Quarter. We walk around the area at night and although we cross Bourbon Street we tend not linger and never visit the bars and music joints. We know they’re there of course and don’t begrudge their patron the thrill of an authentic experience, providing they know what they’re doing and keep their wits about them.

Would a Disneyfied version of the Vieux Carré still be attractive to its patrons? Would a fake Eiffel Tower still draw visitors? I suppose the fake tower in Las Vegas does, but then Vegas has the gambling too……

Is there a doctor in the house?

We just spent a long weekend in New Orleans. We can’t get enough of the place. This time we went to see a show, Jimmy Buffett’s musical ‘Return to Margaritaville’ at the amazingly restored Saenger Theatre. The theatre is a tourist destination in its own right having benefitted from a multi million dollar restoration following the devastation of flooding after Katrina. The Saenger has been returned to better than original, as it incorporates updates to the stage and its public amenities. Well worth a visit.

New Orleans’ tourism is surging. The city has done a lot to encourage visitors with not only great marketing, but ensuring the various tourism and hospitality stakeholders work together to attract both new and old visitors alike. This has paid off with not only increased domestic tourists but attracted new overseas visitors via the new air services that have started over the past year.

While we were in the city we got to experience a service that you don’t immediately think of as being tourist oriented, but is probably essential. Beth my Lady Wife, Chief Researcher and personal travel agent, hurt her foot. Nothing too serious but very painful. We needed to get medical treatment and started to look for a walk-in clinic or something similar. Surprisingly, she found something called NOLA Doc.

This service is run by Dr Mark Berenson, a board certified Family Physician and a native of New Orleans. He earned a medical degree from Tulane University in 2003 and completed residency in 2006 at the UCSF Family Medicine Residency in Santa Rosa, California. Immediately after residency, he took on the role as hospitalist and an emergency physician at several hospitals around the bay area and has also become a member of the UCSF Clinical Faculty as an instructor of Inpatient Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. In 2010, he joined Care Practice of San Francisco, providing acute and primary care in both the office and in-home setting. Having worked for years in both the hospital and in-home setting, Dr. Berenson has learned to clearly distinguish the role for a hospital visit and the importance of staying in one’s home for medical care.

The majority of his time during the week is spent visiting home bound patients, but he is available to make visits to hotels and tourists who find themselves in need of help. This can range from the unexpected illness to cases of, shall we say, over indulgence! The latter is obviously not uncommon in The Crescent City being as it is, the center for all sorts of parties.

Cycling round the French Quarter on his bike, Dr Mark makes calls equipped with everything he needs to cope with the anticipated illness. He doesn’t deal with insurance companies but does take credit cards and supplies an emailed receipt that can obviously submitted to your insurance provider.

His ministrations to Beth allowed her to carry on with the vacation virtually uninterrupted. So, not a ‘normal’ tourist service, but one that works well and if you’re planning a trip to New Orleans his number is worth keeping handy. Check out http://www.noladoc.com.

As for Jimmy Buffett’s musical (which opens in New York in early 2018) it’s a nice feel-good show particularly if you’re a fan of Trop Rock music. We were lucky being there for the last night of the run which featured a surprise appearance by Jimmy Buffett himself

Changing tourist landscape – NWF Daily News

This article first appeared in the Northwest Florida Daily News on Sunday, April 16, 2017.

I’ve discussed recently the many changes that are coming to our local tourist business — generational changes, increases in fly-in visitors, a demand for better level of service and value, etc. I think we’re all surprised by the speed of these changes, thinking that it will take years for them to actually affect our daily lives. However, look how fast Uber, Airbnb and similar new products have altered the landscape.

Back at the end of March, British Airways started to fly non-stop to New Orleans from London, bringing four flights a week. Later in May, Condor, the German airline, will have two flights a week from Frankfurt. While British Airways is banking on a mix of business and leisure travelers, Condor is aimed squarely at the vacation market. These two new routes add to the already existent Toronto flights, routing vacationers into the northern Gulf of Mexico region. There may be no immediate effect on Northwest Florida, apparently giving plenty of planning time.

To read the rest of the article go to

http://ow.ly/3oXX30b1JM6

Northwest Florida Daily News Talking Tourism Column: New Orleans

We just spent a long weekend in New Orleans, which is one of my favorite cities. It’s totally unique. I was first introduced to NOLA in 1972 as a young travel agent on a U.S. tour (seven cities in 10 days!). Being taken to Bourbon Street as a 20-year-old was quite an eye-opener. Luckily my wife lived in New Orleans for quite awhile and really is “local,” so we’re not exactly tourists when we visit at least four times a year.

The city is a real case study for tourism, joining an historic center with a mix of cultures plus being a living, thriving business hub. It has nearly year-round tourism, although the local businesses are only too aware when they have fewer tourists. The Crescent City is known world over for Mardi Gras (or Carnival, as the locals term it) which is both a blessing and a curse as it attracts enormous numbers of tourists. Those tourists tend to consider partying an Olympic sport, which adds a whole new level to tourist management. Natural events like Hurricane Katrina also have put an added strain on the city, and its recovery from a tourism point of view has been nothing short of remarkable.
The great thing about NOLA ………

To read the complete column CLICK HERE