Delightful and surprising Little Rock, Arkansas, is where nearly 300 delegates will be heading August 7-9 for the 2018 Going On Faith Conference. The event will be staged in the Statehouse Convention Center in the heart of downtown. The center is conveniently connected to the official conference hotel: the Little Rock Marriott.
The delegates group will be populated by travel planners from churches and religious organizations around the nation, as well as travel industry representatives who hope to earn their business.
“We certainly look forward to welcoming them and helping them experience the true Little Rock, fall in love with it and want to come back,” said Gretchen Hall, CEO of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau. “From a tourism perspective, our job is to increase the awareness of all the offerings our community has. We have found that people who have visited Little Rock had a great experience, and they share that through word-of-mouth.”
Delegates will hold hundreds of brief meetings during two important marketplace sessions at the conference. The six-minute “get to know you” sessions are where delegates are exposed to a seemingly endless stream of travel ideas they might not ordinarily encounter on their own. The meetings create new contacts and potential new-business relationships.
Delegates will also hear many interesting presentations from major travel organizations that offer memorable trips, both domestically and around the world. Many of these companies will also have booths set up for delegates to visit for one-on-one discussions.
Opening Night and City Highlights
The opening night event and dinner will be held in an unusual venue: a presidential library. Delegates will be given time to visit the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and its collections, which chronicle the last eight years of the 20th century from a presidential perspective. Re-creations of the Clinton Oval Office and Cabinet Room are highlights, as are the many galleries that depict major world and national events and life in the White House. The Clinton Center is on the banks of the Arkansas River in Little Rock and is part of what is known as the River Market District.
“We have a great presence in the downtown area,” said Libby Lloyd, communications manager for the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau. “There has been a lot of renovation and revitalization in that area of town. We have very family-friendly and affordable attractions here in our city, a lot of which are located downtown where most of this conference will take place.”
Ask any delegate and they are likely to cite tours of the host city as the highlight of their Going On Faith Conference experience. For the upcoming conference, Little Rock CVB officials have organized some fun and interesting sightseeing tours during the conference, as well as some wide-ranging preconference and postconference tours.
