Greg Oates

In a city with the sixth largest LGBT population nationwide, Visit Dallas wants meeting planners to know it has a completely different attitude toward equality and tolerance than Houston.

Speed and efficiency are the big priorities for select service properties, especially for business travelers who want their hotel to be as smart and flexible as they are. Demand is growing and that's driving the highest rate and revenue increases across all of Hyatt.

No one has been pushing for hotel groups to develop better meetings industry content than Skift. While Connect+ is an impressive move by Hilton in that regard, there's a lot of opportunity here for more authentic content and intuitive content delivery.

Expanding the convention center and building hotels and light rail transportation were the catalyst for the rebirth of downtown Phoenix. Although, getting Millennials to move into the core was just as important to breathe life into the neighborhoods.

The upcoming PCMA Convening Leaders conference in Vancouver brings top convention planners together with industry educators, who could potentially incorporate more insight from today's most innovative meetings and events.

Because the Tahitian islands are small and tightly clustered, the region provides a unique opportunity to connect multiple communities to create a smart nation economy. It could also serve as a model for other countries, like those in the Caribbean, with GDPs over-reliant on tourism.

Cleveland created competitive advantage in the medical meetings sector by building a silo-busting space for every corporate, scientific and academic leader in medical tech to share knowledge across disciplines.

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The value of this list will grow year-over-year as we start to see movement among the cities.