Six months after announcing Spurgeon Richardson would be stepping down as president of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, the group will vote on a new leader this week.

The ACVB executive committee will meet Thursday morning to vote on the nominee, who also will be the group’s chief executive officer. The candidate will then have to be approved by the full board.

Officials are mum on the name of the candidate, but others in the hospitality community said whoever it is, he or she will hold one of the most important positions in Atlanta.

“In many ways, but in different areas, the job is more important than the mayor’s,” said Bob Hope, president of Atlanta public relations agency Hope-Beckham, explaining that the ACVB president has to convince conventioneers and visitors to come to Atlanta in the highly competitive destination business.

“Within the tourism and tradeshow industry, the convention bureau has a lot of power,” he said.

At $11.4 billion, metro Atlanta’s convention and tourism business is one of the city’s most important economic segments. It fills hotels, convinces big name restaurateurs to locate in Georgia’s capital, and helps drive retail development. Thousands of jobs depend on bringing visitors to the city.

For many, the ACVB is the face of that business, hospitality leaders said, and requires a strong leader who can position Atlanta as a destination in an environment that has seen an explosion over the last decades in bigger convention centers and more tourist attractions.

“The role of the ACVB is critically important to the continuing growth of our community, said Mark Woodworth, executive vice president of PKF Consulting Inc., an Atlanta firm that tracks the health of the hotel industry.

While half of the city’s roughly 93,000 hotel rooms are filled by business travelers, the other half is split between conventioneers and leisure travelers, Woodworth said. They are coaxed here largely by the efforts of the ACVB.

The new ACVB leader will have challenges. The slumping economy has forced conventioneers and travelers to tighten their belts. Dan Graveline, the executive director of the Georgia World Congress Center, said recently that based on a preliminary look at business for fiscal 2010, the center could lose money for the first time in years.

The city also has changed since Richardson became head of the ACVB in the early 1990s. The 1996 Summer Olympics gave Atlanta international exposure that drove many to consider the city as a place for work and play.

The payoff in the last few years has been an increase in new hotels, high-end restaurants and sought after events like the Louvre show at the High Museum of Art and the upcoming King Tut exhibit at the Atlanta Convention Center.

Residents also are embracing a younger generation that has ideas that mix an urban, more fast-paced feel to the city with its traditional southern charm, said Marylouise Fitzgibbon, general manager of the W Buckhead and a board member of the Georgia Hotel & Lodging Association. Builders and planners are focusing on making the city more walkable to give visitors more reasons to get out of their cars and stay awhile. That’s a change from the past when the car was the center of Atlantan’s thinking.

“We are at crossroads ,” said Fitzgibbon. “We are going through a transformation.”