General Manager of the Omni, Scott Stuckey, said the hotel had received calls from each convention, stating they were “withdrawing from negotiations.”
“We have used discretion in discussing this issue and have not identified the conventions, in hopes that we could persuade them to do business with Omni and Louisville in the future.”
The statement comes after Mayor Greg Fischer recently announced that two conventions had pulled out of Louisville amid the travel ban.
Fischer said in a Tweet Saturday afternoon the travel ban is a real threat to Louisville tourism.
“It hurts the economic momentum we have with 25 new hotels,” Fischer said in a video posted to Twitter. “We’ve seen in other states such as North Carolina where these travel bans go into effect. It does not get any better. It just leads to more and more bad announcements.”
Fischer called on city and state leaders to act on the ban as quickly as possible, asking them to clarify the language of Kentucky’s new law on religious or political expression in schools.
That law is what prompted California’s Attorney General to block state-funded travel to the state, stating the bill could allow LGBT discrimination.
“This hurts the people of our city, because of the jobs that are impacted by this. It’s my job as mayor to stand up for our citizens to make sure we have continued economic growth,” he said.
