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Interview with Leah Shah from Visit Houston and Melvin Tennant from Meet Minneapolis about the planning and execution that goes into hosting the Super Bowl. Houston hosted the Super Bowl in 2017 and Minneapolis will host the Super Bowl in 2018.

Leah Shah is the director of public relations for Visit Houston and Houston First Corporation. In addition to working with journalists covering the city of Houston, she helps manage the online content of the organization’s network of websites.

Previously she’s served as the Public Information Officer for the City of Austin’s Transportation Department where she led all media relations and community engagement initiatives. Prior to that, she was the managing editor for two newspapers, The Taylor Daily Press and The Hutto News, near Austin, Texas.

Melvin Tennant has been president and chief executive officer of Meet Minneapolis, Convention and Visitors Association since 2008. He’s also executive director of Sports Minneapolis which had a big hand in locking in Super Bowl 2018, the NCAA Men’s Final Four Championship in 2019 and the X Games in 2017 and 2018.

He previously served in similar capacities in Charlotte, N.C., San Antonio, Texas and Oakland, Calif. Convention and visitor bureaus.

Hosts: Leif Pettersen of Leif Pettersen PR and Chris Christensen of BloggerBridge.com and AmateurTraveler.com.

Thanks to Ragan Awards for sponsoring this episode. Use the code TRAVEL to save 25% on the following:

• The 2017 Video & Visual Awards which will celebrate the best corporate videos and visual
  designs from the past year.
• The 2017 PR Daily Awards which will focus on the industry’s most successful PR campaigns,
  publications and events.
• The 2017 Ace Awards which honors individual PR practitioners, in-house teams and agencies.

Entries will be accepted through Dec. 20 at 11:59 p.m. CST.

Visit Ragan.com/Awards to enter.

About Chris Christensen

Chris Christensen is the CEO at BloggerBridge.com, a website that helps connect companies with relevant bloggers, writers, podcasters, videographers, and other content creators. He’s also the host of the Amateur Traveler Podcast, which he’s been producing almost as long as this show, since June 2005. Chris is also a coder; he was a director of Engineering for TripAdvisor, Executive VP of Engineering and Operations for LiveWorld, and a manager at Apple, designing and programming server solutions.