I vote for New Orleans, my other home…affordable, friendly, the best food in the USA and more than enough things to see and do between show times. Plus the weather is usually pretty nice. Outside of the time the city needed to recover from the major hit it took by Hurricane Katrina…the place is fully recovered as far as handling conferences and juggled three major sports play-offs, a major conference and Mardi Gras all within a 30-day period Dec 2007-Jan 2008.

Pretty impressive for being totally underwater two years earlier. Any tales of crime in New Orleans are almost exclusively in the ghetto areas and are 99.9 percent black-on-black and drug related. Nothing a convention-goer needs to worry about.

Besides, where else can you go and see Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie just riding bikes around or hanging out in a local bar having a slice of pizza with the locals?

As far as non-US cities….Frankfurt, Germany has an impressive convention center run by Messe Frankfurt. I’ve been to a dozen conventions there. Affordable once you know the right places, well-organized transportation and logistics, enough people who speak some English so you can function….but grey, dreary weather half the year.

When I was 5 my parents first put me on the Amtrack (alone in those days was safe) to be met by my Grandmother Sylvie Rosenbaum at Penn Station. She and Grandpa Aurthur would take me to see Leonerd Bernstein and Aaron Copeland at Lincoln Center. My Grandfather worked for NY Life on the 43rd floor of the Empire State Building as a sales manager.

In the 90′s when I worked for PolyGram I’d stay at (what was then) the HoJos on eighth Ave and 52cnd for weeks at at time. My wife Laura and I escape to New York 2-4 times a year for the explicit purposes of art, humanity, shopping, and eating. I love the Kosher food on the lower est side, sweet pork rolls in ChinaTown, and family 5 course meals in Little Italy. Nothing beats pasta in heaps at Carmine’s on Broadway. I love just riding the subway to Brooklyn amongst a symphonic sea of humanity living in the greatest melting pot experiment in human history…NYC.

If you are at SMX Social we could compare notes. Wine is a particular hobby of mine. No place compares to New York. Thanks for the survey.

Marty

Sorry, I didn’t mean to post three times. I tried to change one word in the post as it was submitting, and it saved three times.

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As for LA as a conference city in our poll, it’s not a city I’ve been to for a conference like the others on the list and no major search marketing conference has been held there.

If we run this poll again next year, we may have a reason to include it.

I’m curious you didn’t add Los Angeles? We’re getting a huge amount of interest in our upcoming event there and I know Brett is doing a Webmaster World there as well this year.

The commute from home to the Hilton is awful, though. Next time, I might stay closer to the conference venue.