The American Heart Association has canceled plans to hold its 2012 scientific sessions conference in New Orleans, tourism officials say. The group, which brought 26,000 attendees to a New Orleans session in November 2008, has “decided to expand the rotation of current cities to include a broader variety of venues for our attendees,” vice president Leigh Ann Stockard wrote this week in a brief letter to the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We were very disappointed,” CVB president Stephen Perry says. “American Heart is very important because it has been one of our oldest customers and it is one of the major meetings in the country.” The city is still on the association’s books for the 2016 scientific conference. A stroke meeting, expected to attract about 5,000 attendees, is still planned in New Orleans in 2012.
Maggie Francis, spokeswoman for the association, says the group considers air service for domestic and international flights, meeting space, ground transportation, medical response times and police presence when evaluating cities. The group only holds meetings in smoke-free cities. Francis would not say which, if any, of those factored in the decision to move the New Orleans meeting. “In the meetings between us and their executives, they told us that there was nothing we could do or offer,” Perry says.
