Kelly Schulz
Senior Vice President of Communications & Public Relations
Kelly Schulz is the Senior Vice President of Communications for New Orleans & Company, the city’s official destination sales and marketing organization. She has 25 years of public relations and crisis management experience in the travel industry.
After graduating from LSU with degrees in mass comm and psychology, she began her career at Edelman, a global PR firm. In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck Kelly’s hometown of New Orleans, she was working in Dallas as Director of Communications for Meeting Professionals International. Her childhood home was destroyed, as well as the homes of her entire family. Many outsiders questioned if New Orleans would ever re-open, let alone welcome visitors and conventions.
A few months later, Kelly received an unexpected opportunity to return home for a job at New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB was later renamed New Orleans & Company). She saw it as a way to help rebuild her hometown because tourism is New Orleans’ most important industry.
From 2006 until 2014, Kelly served as a member of the executive team responsible for taking New Orleans from an all-time low of three million visitors in 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina, to one of National Geographic Traveler’s Must See Places to Visit in the World for 2014, with nine million visitors and record-breaking visitor spending. Under her leadership, the New Orleans CVB won 16 international awards of excellence for crisis management and public relations between 2006 and 2014.
Kelly left the travel industry for a few years to raise funds and awareness for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, but returned home to New Orleans & Company in 2020 to manage crisis communications during the pandemic. Today she and her team have the honor of sharing good news about New Orleans with the world and assisting thousands of members, journalists and influencers each year.