After more than 30 years away from her hometown, Monica Smith is back in Jacksonville and glad to be here.
Smith is the new vice president of sales and services at Visit Jacksonville, the destination marketing organization for Duval County.
“It’s great to be home and it’s great to be able to sell Jacksonville,” she said.
Smith most recently was CEO of the Macon-Bibb County Convention and Visitors Bureau in Georgia, where she had worked since 2010.
Smith’s family moved from Jacksonville to Ohio when she was 7. She got the hospitality industry bug when she was a teen and had a part-time job at a hotel.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1995 with a degree in hotel administration, Smith thought she wanted a career as a hotel controller.
“I liked the financial aspect, but I realized I wanted more interaction with people,” she said.
Smith made the transition from counting the money to making the money when she went to work as national sales manager at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Ohio.
After nearly three years, she was off to Cleveland, first as an account executive with that city’s convention bureau.
Smith later was senior sales manager at the Intercontinental Hotel in Cleveland.
Her next relocation was to the West Coast, where she worked in sales and executive management with the tourism development agencies in Newport Beach, Calif., and later in Pasadena before taking the job in Macon.
“I was trying to get closer to back home,” Smith said.
That’s six cities in about 20 years, which is pretty much par for the course in the hospitality industry, she said.
“That’s the nature of our business. In order to advance, you have to be willing to move,” said Smith.
When she left California and headed to Georgia in 2010, it was for a promotion — to president and CEO of the Macon-Bibb County Convention and Visitors Bureau — and to be closer to home and family in Jacksonville.
While in Macon, Smith led the sales team to a 28 percent increase in convention business and a 246 percent increase in group tour business.
She has spent her first two weeks at Visit Jacksonville getting to know the sales and services staff and rediscovering her childhood home.
“It has completely changed since I was growing up. I’m a visitor in my hometown,” Smith said.
She plans for Jacksonville to be the last entry on her resume.
“I’ve done my time traveling. I hope this is my retirement job,” said Smith.
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