DMC Pioneer in the ADMEI Hall of Fame
BBC’s fearless leader Bonnie Boyd won the prestigious ADMEI Lifetime Achievement Award at the ADMEI Annual Conference in Oklahoma City, Okla. (Feb. 10-14) for 30 years of advocacy for the DMC industry and her beloved destination of New Orleans.
Bonnie has been a pioneer in the DMC field. She has built a small business in New Orleans that is doing big things with grace. She is known as a leader in the DMC industry, both locally and internationally. Her partners, clients, contractors, vendors, employees, and past employees, not only see Bonnie as an inspiration, but as a friend and confidant. Her hard work and dedication are influential. Her enthusiastic love for the city is contagious! It is this same passion that makes her a driving force as a female business owner, industry leader, community volunteer, New Orleans ambassador, and DMC advocate.
Bonnie has been “making people feel comfortable as they travel” as far back in her career as she can remember. After graduate school, she worked in D.C. making travel arrangements for visiting professors. A few years later, while working in a Relocation Department for a New Orleans-based real-estate firm, Bonnie helped families from all over as they relocated to New Orleans. As Bonnie matched families with New Orleans neighborhoods, something clicked: she loved sharing New Orleans and making people feel at home in her city, and she was good at it.
Within a year, Bonnie began working as a “Ground Operator” in the French Quarter (before the term Destination Management Company) welcoming corporate clients to the city of New Orleans for meetings and incentive trips, coordinating everything from dinners and galas to transportation and tours. Here Bonnie worked operations on her very first program—a memory of which she remembers every detail from her black blazer to the visiting company’s excitement. She was hooked.
In 1982 Bonnie worked for Helen Dietrich, who founded the first DMC in New Orleans, Dietrich Tours and Entertainment. Here, Bonnie had the pleasure of “selling” New Orleans for the first time. By the late 80’s she was working for Capricho DMC, where she really started to delve into the DMC industry, making connections, friends, and understanding the impact of her work on the city. She also started traveling and selling New Orleans, sometimes even paying her own way to trade shows as far as Canada because she knew it was the best way to promote her services and the destination.
On April 1, 1991, she founded Bonnie Boyd and Company, known today as BBC Destination Management. She knew that owning her own DMC was the only way to make the impact she wanted on both the DMC and local hospitality industry. As a founding board member of MPI Gulfstates and a founding member of SITE Southeast, Bonnie pioneered the DMC industry in the Gulf region. Her work as a volunteer meeting planner for industry affiliated groups like FICP, TSE, GEP, and ISES shows her commitment to furthering both the DMC and local hospitality industries. Her service on the international SITE Board allowed her to engagement the DMC community on an international level and today she furthers that commitment locally on the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau.
However, her commitment shined its brightest in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated her city. With staff members scattered in towns near and far, Bonnie and her small team worked to pull business back together days following the storm. Programs were canceled. Refunds were given. The company was forced to downsize to three full-time employees. However, Bonnie never lost hope. On September 27, 2005 (1mo after the storm), Bonnie flew to Chicago for IT&ME just as she did every year. The world did not know whether New Orleans would stand or not, but the small BBC team had faith. It was the first time that they spoke about the city after the storm. They were welcomed with such emotional support from DMC partners and friends, that they knew they were going to make it.
During that same time, Bonnie was working diligently with a long-time client to restore their annual meeting. After many calls, Bonnie secured 35 rooms at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which was open to serve FBI agents and journalist covering the storm. In coordination with the Royal Sonesta and Chef Paul Prudhomme, Bonnie opened the doors to the city for 35 professionals in October 2005. Chef Prudhomme personally welcomed these guests to K-Paul’s Kitchen. This program was the iconic first step on a road to rebuild the hospitality industry in New Orleans—showing the importance of DMCs to the local industry that attracted over 9mil in 2014. Since then, Bonnie and her team have welcomed nearly 1,150 companies from around the world to the Crescent City, and well over 25,000 corporate travelers, and hired 270+ local contractors.
After record breaking years in 2014 and 2015, Bonnie continues to grow her business alongside the growing cultural landscape of New Orleans. BBC welcomed 5 new hires in the past year bringing BBC’s full-time staff to the largest it’s been in company history and winning Best Places to Work in New Orleans in 2015. BBC continues to be the premier marketer of New Orleans in the Canadian market, and is growing its market reach with constant involvement in meeting planner conventions from IMEX in Frankfurt, Germany to FICP in Nashville, TN.
