The Association of Marina Industries opened its annual Conference & Expo yesterday at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Fla., with a record number of exhibitors for the three-day event. This year’s program offers training sessions, educational seminars, and social and professional events, including a tour of local marinas yesterday — Halifax Harbor Marina, Inlet Harbor Marina and New Smyrna Marina.
“We have 176 exhibit booths sold,” Kayce Florio, conference director and AMI business manager, told Trade Only Today. “We also had a 20-booth waitlist. So this is a really big year for us, and we hit all-time records for all of our partner relationships. We had that much interest this year.
“You try to understand the psychology of it all, but it’s hard to say,” Florio added. “Whether business is really good, or maybe they feel like it’s getting soft, so they feel like they need to be here and be in front of people, but this year we sold out our exhibitor hall before Thanksgiving, and that’s never happened before.”
Yesterday’s session on artificial intelligence, “From Docks to Data: Unlocking AI’s Power in Marinas,” was the biggest conference workshop AMI has ever held, Florio said, and two more sessions on AI follow today. It’s a strong theme of this year’s conference.
“The individuals running the marinas,” Florio said, “they’re not spending their days behind computers. They’re walking the docks. So any kind of information that they can glean from the training that we have here is going to help them. That first session was about giving them simple AI strategies to help their operations every day.”
With so many workshops on subjects vital to the marina industry, Florio suggested that attendees should strategize to use their time wisely. “We have an AMI member meeting, which is also a first-time attendee meeting, and we try to encourage people to tag-team the sessions and trade notes. There’s so much going on in three days,”
The conference includes two keynote addresses, this morning by Michael Lee and tomorrow by Annie Meehan. Also today, the third annual Women’s Leadership Panel will be moderated by Michelle Alexandrowicz, of Engage, with panelists including Margaret Boshek, Carolina Corral, Laura Gilham and Lori Wheeler.
The AMI conference runs through tomorrow.
More information about AMI’s ongoing training is available here, or contact Merritt Alves at [email protected].
