Posted on Fri, Nov 19, 2010 @ 09:05 AM
We've found a nice, little place out in cyberspace and are moving into our new Wordpress blog location next week. We think you'll agree, it's a much cleaner and more powerful experience.
The url will still be http://blog.experient-inc.com, but those of you who subscribe by email or to the RSS feed on our current blog site may have to re-subscribe at the new location. Of course, if you follow us on Facebook or Twitter you'll always know when the latest blog posts are up.
We look forward to seeing you on our new site. We have a lot of great content planned for the blog going into 2011. Thanks for your support and comments thus far.
And, tell a friend about the Event Industry Blog! We're interested in growing this peer community.
Posted on Tue, Nov 16, 2010 @ 03:18 PM
Post authored by Terence Donnelly, CMP - Vice President, Sales & Account Management at Experient
First, it was about “who’s coming to the event” and whether you had a function room big enough (or small enough) to hold the number of persons attending. Along with that was budgeting and if you were charging for this event, you needed to have funds in advance and create a mechanism to collect those funds to pay vendors to execute the event. Up until the early 1990s, a lot of this was done through forms – paper forms that you filled out and either mailed or faxed back. Today, this task is easily accomplished through hundreds of different online registration tools – proprietary and off-the-shelf - that facilitate this transaction.
For most tradeshow and conference organizers, it’s all about the data. Particularly for larger events with sponsors and exhibitors with large budgets, the event organizer needs access to real-time data to make informed decisions and communicate effectively to their constituents.
So, it’s not about badges anymore. If an event organizer just uses some system to credential their attendees and exhibitors, they really are missing the advantage that a more sophisticated registration solution can provide them – the advantage of accessing real-time information and transforming that data into information that drives business decisions… Insight.
DATA 
INFORMATION INSIGHT
What should an event organizer be looking for? Not just a registration system that can provide data – but one that provides the data as real-time actionable information. The days of making decisions based upon intuition are over in this changing economy.
There are hundreds of data points and each show manager has various needs in this area. For some show managers, it’s important that they can scrutinize attendee behavior over time to establish buyer levels. By tracking their purchase behavior and activity on the exhibit floor, show management can up-sell packages and sessions, and provide them a custom experience based upon past activity and interests.
Lastly, what’s important is that you find a registration system that can adapt to the changing needs of show management and can deliver on its promise. So tell us, which of these reporting features are important to you? Go ahead and rank them in your comments below!
1. At-a-glance, quick-click access to your most important reporting information
2. Easy-to-understand graphics right on your own computer
3. Ability to access information quickly and make strategic decisions based on accurate data
4. Graphs of key performance indicators for registration and reservation statistics
5. Top 10 reports configured per your needs and provided in one concise list for easy access
6. Access to year-over-year pacing reports for registration and room block penetration for housing to monitor performance against previous year
7. Customer search tool that allows you to review and edit registrant information, preview and send confirmations immediately
8. Charts that can be pulled directly from the system for easy transfer into Executive Level reports
9. Custom quick links for important event-related sites such as lead retrieval, attendee web page, exhibitor web page and more
10. Benchmarks against “like” industries, markets, and previous year’s statistics and performances.
Let’s get the conversation started!
Posted on Tue, Nov 09, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Post authored by Susan Bennett, CASE, CEM - Vice President, Sales & Account Management at Experient and 2010 IAEE Washington D.C. Chapter Chair
The Victory Loop process allows critical factors for success to be identified and assessed. This process has three stages: (1) Plan Well, (2) Execute Well, and (3) Learn Well which allows an immediate review of the outcome versus the goals, creates best practices, and reinforces continuous learning. Actually, I envision it more like a staircase than a loop, with each step leading to the next. The Learn Well stage should be the first step in Planning Well for the next event.
The time planning and executing can outweigh the time evaluating the outcome against the goals. The lessons we learn are filed away in our memory banks and not captured in a structured after action review for use prior to the next event. When the Victory Loop process is first introduced it highlights how often we “do it that way because we have always done it that way.”
The first stage is Planning Well. In this stage, ask what the intent of the action being taken is and what is the desired goal? Let’s apply the Victory Loop process to the planning of housing for an event. For example, one of the goals in the planning stage is to improve usage of the room block from 85% to 87% for an event. Our intent is to ensure we maximize the room blocks. To accomplish this goal, we plan to target specific registrants in past years that have stayed outside the block. Communication of the desired goals to the project team is critical as we move into the execution stage. We have completed the first two stages….identified a goal or the intent of our actions, and executed our plan.
To begin the Learning Well stage, we asked what have we learned from what we tried and what actually happened? We learned that by proactively contacting our target list of registrants that stayed outside the block in previous years, we were successful in converting a percentage of them to stay in the housing block.
What do we know now that we did not know before we started? We identified factors not previously considered on why a percentage stays outside the block.
If someone where to start down the same path, what advice would I give this person? We would recommend a survey to those that stayed outside the block to identify key factors in their decision.
To summarize our example of the three steps:
Step 1: Plan Well, Our intent was to maximize our room blocks and the goal was to increase usage from 85% to 87%.
Step 2: Execute Well, We contacted a target list of registrants that stayed outside the block in previous years.
Step 3: Learn Well, Proactive targeted marketing converted some to stay within the block. We identified factors not previously considered for why they stayed outside the block in the past and will use those factors when planning the next event. We reached our goal and increased the percentage from 85% to 87%.
Ready to take your first step?
Posted on Tue, Nov 02, 2010 @ 09:42 AM
Post authored by Jeremy T. Janszen, SSGB- Experient's SocialMpact Service Designer.
It’s overwhelming how much our industry likes to talk about social media. For the time and white space it commands in the conversations we have, in our general sessions and breakouts, and scribbled across thousands of pages of our industry’s print and online articles, you’d think we’d be better at it. Heck, you’d think we were all experts! But, as with many things, the breakdown is in the know-how of connecting tools to goals. This takes thought, analysis, testing, and much, much more than knowing (or reading) that you can use social media to accomplish a “Top 10” list of things. Of course you can. But the tricky thing is how? The articles always seem to leave that part out.
Over the past year, I’ve jumped into numerous meetings and onto dozens of phone calls with customers and industry peers discussing social media and how the event industry has been – and is planning to – embrace these tools to help execute first-rate meetings, events, and tradeshows. The results of these discussions, and additional research efforts, have revealed some very reliable proofs:
Proof 1: Event organizers understand that their audience (defined commonly as: members, attendees, exhibitors, and prospects) is online, participating in social media and present on various platforms, and that they need to engage with them in these locations. This is basic Marketing 101: Go to where your people are.
Proof 2: Event organizers, in large part, have tested the waters of social media by setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts for their organization or events, pushed out a variety of messages through those platforms, and have generated a small (and oftentimes described as “inactive”) online community connected to them. These initial, water-testing efforts are almost universally conducted prior to the development of any formal social media strategy or plan as a way for the organization to, at minimum, just “get in the game.” And, except for a minority, results have been generally disappointing or non-existent.
Proof 3: Event organizers do, typically, have an idea of what they hope to achieve for their organizations by participating in social media. Whether documented as part of a plan or not, common goals include:
• Recruiting new event attendees (by far the #1 goal) and extending event marketing;
• Creating additional networking opportunities for members and event attendees (Who hasn’t heard the statement, “We want to extend our week-long event into a year-round experience...”?);
• Increasing the organization’s online visibility and position as a subject matter authority
Proof 4: Equipped with (essentially) free access to all of the necessary social media tools and armed with an idea of what they hope to accomplish with them, event organizers have an incredibly difficult time connecting the two sides. This typically leads to a stalled-out effort or, at minimum, putting the effort “on the back burner” because the individual or organization can’t justify allocating resources to a task that isn’t showing any promising results.
Does this describe your organization?
Fear not. You are not alone.
Building the bridge between accessible social media tools and the goals you hope to achieve with them doesn’t take an advanced engineering degree. It takes time, attention, and commitment. It also takes an understanding of your audience and their needs. Why would they want to connect to you online? What can you offer them that they can’t get anywhere else? What are you doing to make them a raving (online) fan of your organization and brand? Starting with their needs and working backward is how you’re going to build this bridge. Sure, it would be easier to identify what your organization hopes to get out of the online connection and push, push, push (see your 100th Twitter post that reads: “Click here to register for the conference.”) but that’s not working. It takes a little more value creation before you can ask for the sale – or ask for anything, for that matter.
Successful bridge building also requires an understanding about your own organization’s environment. How do you communicate and about what? What knowledge and information assets do you have at your disposal – both as documented content and in the form of people? How can you enlist them? What do you have to give? That’s right. Social media is a “give before you get” game.
Knowing your audience and knowing yourself are integral parts of the bridge-building blueprint. Armed with this knowledge, you can begin to unleash the power of the social media tools you possess and adapt them to your social infrastructure. The pieces start to easily fall into place because you empathize with your audience and their needs while at the same time can plot the course between what you offer them and what they bring back to you. You might need someone to help you figure this out, or plan the course, or to bring new ideas to the table and help accelerate them, but little success will come unless you’re prepared to understand your audience and yourself first. Then, all of a sudden, that “Top 10” blog post starts to make a lot more sense.
To discover how to build that bridge between social media tools and your event goals of driving attendance and mobilizing community participation, click to download Experient's Social Media Playbook =>=>=>
Posted on Wed, Oct 27, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Post authored by Timothy J. La Fleur, CMP - Meeting and Event Manager at Experient.
With any new technology there are some basic questions to be asked: What is it? What does it do? How can this benefit my event?
First, we’ll tackle the question of what it is; but before we get too far along, we should understand that there are two basic kinds of mobile conference apps: “Web-based” and “native-based.”
Web-based apps can be accessed by any Internet-ready phone.
By using the web browser on your phone, you can access a conference app much like accessing a website.
Native-based apps are downloaded and installed to your smartphone and work like any other program feature (e.g. calculator, alarm clock, camera, etc.). 
These conference mobile apps are small programs that can be installed right to your Blackberry, iPhone, or Android platform phones. They are typically created and designed by a third party company with your specific event in mind.
With each of these apps, there are very distinct advantages and disadvantages. For the Web-based, the primary advantage is that you can access the app on any Internet-ready. Of course, the major disadvantage is its reliance on a fast and uninterrupted cellular connection. If you are in a location that has a bad cell signal, your app will run slowly or not at all. Native-based apps, once downloaded to your phone, run independently of any Internet connectivity. No matter where you are, you can use your app. The major disadvantage, however, is that native-based apps require attendees to have a Blackberry, iPhone, or Android platform phone – which, right now, isn’t always the case. Ideally, you would like an app that can be simultaneously Web-based and native-based to reach the largest number of people.
The next piece of the puzzle is what do these conference apps do? These apps can virtually serve many functions for your conference, but I will break them down into 4 major areas.
1. Replace the conference program book.
2. List exhibit hall floor plans and help attendees manage which exhibitors that they would like to visit.
3. Act as a personal concierge for the attendee by helping them choose and locate local dining, entertainment, and attractions.
4. Act as a conference message board, serve as the pulse and conference lifeline for your attendees, and used as platform for social media engagement.
A conference app can be used as an electronic program book by housing all of the relevant session information, including session abstracts, session times, meeting rooms, speaker bios and any handouts they wish to distribute as attachments. In some apps, you can build your schedule as you go by clicking on “add” buttons while searching the list of sessions. Additionally, you could link to web-forums right from the session description to engage with other people who are going to this session as well, and start the attendee engagement before the session even takes place. You could also post surveys for attendees to complete about a session they just attended.
Not to be outdone by the program books, the exhibit hall is another place where conference apps can be very beneficial. Conference apps have many ways to give exhibitors new and additional exposure. Most conference apps will allow for the exhibit hall floor plan to be shown on the attendee’s phone to assist them in planning their time on the show floor. In some apps, an attendee can add which booths they want to visit and the app will map out a best route based on flow of the exhibit hall. Show managers can also provide exhibitors the opportunity to put a small bio together about their company for quick access by attendees. The information medium can be anything from static text to a short informational video about themselves and their products, or a simple link to their website.
Conference apps also act as your personal and private meeting concierge. You can either have a link to Google maps where you can plot and plan their trip, or you can have pre-determined restaurants and venues for your attendee to choose from based on experience and customer ratings. Of course, be sure to include contact information and directions to the selected venues.
Lastly, these apps can serve as a conference message board. Show managers can send text messages and alerts through the conference app to announce a change in schedule, session cancellations, or room changes. Or, use the app to promote special evening activities and receptions, or remind attendees that the trade show floor is open encouraging them to visit. Through the conference app, you can remind or alert your attendees of almost anything.
There are many benefits from using a conference app for your event. First and foremost, it can be a cost savings for your event. Since conference apps have the potential to replace large quantities of printed materials, you save printing and shipping costs. Not mention if there are fewer printed materials you reduce your carbon footprint and therefore make your meeting greener.
By using a conference mobile app, you also open a new world of sponsorship opportunities where one or more official sponsor(s) could cover the cost of the conference app build out and therefore become a new revenue stream for your event. Another sponsorship opportunity would be the conference alerts or possibly exhibitor alerts to announce happenings in their booth such as book signings, raffles, or sponsored food events. Perhaps one of the biggest benefits is engaging attendees in a new way. As a society, we have switched to consuming media and information “on demand” and this expectation is creeping into the way our attendees want to access conference information.
Don’t think that mobile apps are only for the benefit of attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors. Meeting planners can utilize certain apps for their own use to improve the planning or onsite process. One example is a “clicker” app to count the number of attendees at a catered event. I found an app named “T-Counter” which not only allows you to collect data, but also allows you to e-mail the information for real time data collection. This is just one example of what could go into a “Planner’s App Toolbox.” The website www.meetingapps.com contains various types of apps that might be helpful, although currently they only provide apps for iPhones.
As media consumption continues to evolve into 24/7 access, the modern conference attendee will expect their conference information to do the same. This emerging trend has tangible benefits for many events and as planners we should continue being ahead of the technology curve.
To take a walk through the mobile event app for CES, click here.
Posted on Tue, Oct 19, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Post authored by David Beckett
1. People don’t read your signs – It’s a busy registration area and attendees’ eyes are glazed upon arrival. They will follow the crowd before reading a sign. When the area is crowded, signs at waist level become invisible, and you’re better off putting them on the floor. I’ve noticed that grocery stores are using this tactic to market products that are right there on the shelf. Think about using your onsite signage in the same manner. We also tend to use industry jargon. Before you joined the events industry, could you explain the difference between these two signs commonly seen in the registration area: “Advanced Registration” versus “Onsite Registration?”
2. Set up area from largest to smallest – The first area that is seen upon arrival should be used for the largest crowds to keep them from wandering around and creating a congested area. This may seem counter-intuitive because you don’t want congestion at the door. But as long as there is no congestion at the egress, it makes sense. And remember crowd flow, people take the first chance to turn left.
3. Stagger the busses – Use this scheduling technique to ease the pressure of heavy arrivals. Even a 15 minute delay schedule will make a significant difference with your lines.
4. Keep your registration hours consistent – It is not uncommon for several different registration times to be promoted at an event. The hotels have one schedule, the web site another and then another one in the show guide. Lock them in and communicate them consistently to avoid confusion.
5. Resist the urge to reduce the registration area – We tend to take the size of the registration area and the process for granted. Therefore, it becomes easy to reduce the space to save on costs or to reuse the area for something else. Remember, this is the first impression for your registrants. You want it busy but not over crowed.
6. Determine your line threshold – Fast food restaurants have a code word for when the drive thru line is too long. What is your plan when the line starts to wrap around the corner? Prepare a demark point (ex. the end of the stanchions) which can be used as your indicator. Then, put a response plan in place.
The take away: Empathize with your attendees. When it comes to onsite registration, keep the flow intuitive and handle the biggest needs first. Focus on keeping the lines moving. The customer service advantage will set the tone for a great event experience.
David Beckett is Experient's Senior Vice President, Registration and Onsite Services Group. To learn more about him, click here.
Posted on Tue, Oct 12, 2010 @ 09:00 AM
Post authored by Gary Schirmacher, CMP
Cities are trying to hit travelers with higher taxes than ever. Have you noticed how many cities are raising their lodging tax in recent weeks? Across the country, cities are "being forced" by their own admission to raise taxes to compensate for budget shortfalls. Is your budget prepared for these higher taxes?
These taxes can sometimes come into play within a calendar year making it very difficult for individuals and companies to budget for the increased expenditure. In many cities, there are three different taxes from city, county and use tax that can appear on a room folio. In fact, we added fields in our expense reporting tool to list up to five separate taxes on one room.
A 2009 report by the National Business Travel Association states “taxes for a single night at the national average room rate of $95.61 were $13.12. The combined lodging taxes levied by state, county and city averaged 13.73%. Tax rates ranged from 10.05% in Burbank, California, to 17.91% in New York." It would be very interesting to see how this figure has increased in 2010.
According to Roger Wu from USA Today, "Taxing visitors is an old habit for local governments. Revenue from taxes on hotel rooms and rental cars have been used to fund tourism promotion, build stadiums and repair roads." However, a website called TravelersFirst is assisting travelers in taking a stand against these taxes as well as informing them on which add-on fees apply.
There is much controversy on whether online travel agencies (OTAs) or hotels should pay more in taxes. In an excellent article, "Taxing controversy: Should hotels or booking engines be paying more in taxes?" Brad Tuttle explores the complicated issue of whether a city should receive tax on the room rate paid by the attendee or amount based on what the hotel actually collects after the OTA booking fees are assessed.
Personally, I believe that cities, states and even the federal government will continue to consider ways to tax travelers and meeting organizers. It's easy money and with the economy re-bounding, occupancies are improving. Taxes are a simple way to squeeze more money out of travelers that are often reimbursed for the expenses surrounding their trip.
When does it end? Can we do anything to stop cities from increasing not only lodging, but also food and beverage taxes? Probably not, but we can budget sensibly and ask plenty of questions when considering which cities to book meetings in. When lodging taxes are averaging 18% and F&B taxes with service charges reach 35%, will a breakfast cost over $70/person at a hotel? It's quickly approaching thresholds where tax amounts will become a key factor in deciding where to place business.
This Sales Tax Wiki is a great resource to look up taxes by state, and will make you realize the amount of money that an average person pays annually for taxes, especially if they are a traveler who purchases goods and services while on the road.
In addition, here are two other resources that provide information on why it's so important to research and budget for taxes when you are traveling or planning a meeting. Travel Taxes in Top 50 US Destinations and Discriminatory Taxes on Travelers.
Gary Schirmacher, CMP is Experient's Senior Vice President of Strategic Account Services. To learn more about him, click here.
Posted on Tue, Oct 05, 2010 @ 09:48 AM
Post authored by Victor Kippes, CEO of Validar. To learn more about him, click here.
I always ask this question of prospects and customers, knowing in the back of my mind that the answer is nebulous and difficult to answer. By nebulous and difficult I mean: the key performance metrics of their answer is strife with holes regarding economic value. I was in a meeting today and asked a Fortune 100 customer this very question regarding a series of B2B lead generation events they were producing. Here is the response I received:
1) Deviation of attendance level from previous year
2) Decrease or increase of registered attendees versus attended
3) Lead volumes of exhibiting sponsors
4) Exit surveys gauging value of session topics and overall event performance.
Now, imagine if you have P&L responsibility for the investment and faced with budget restrictions due to economic times. You are looking for the largest return on investment and this response, even if positive doesn’t raise a high level of confidence regarding “bang for your buck”.
There are articles everywhere bashing events as a marketing investment and I believe the main reason why is the failure to articulate revenue contribution. (The 10 Dumbest Things Businesses Buy) I also believe marketers are not receiving credit for their revenue contribution and companies devalue these investments.
What should you do?
I have noticed some companies today focusing on identifying opportunities at events and building a lead management foundation that empowers them to track these opportunities through their lifecycle.
What is an opportunity?
If the purpose of your event is to introduce new products and services to an audience of customers, prospects and partners and to drive post-event sales, an opportunity is:
“Who left that event with a renewed interest and propensity to buy based upon the experience they had?”
You need to identify these opportunities at the event, document the size of them and track them until they close.
Imagine if your response to the question above was:
1) We identified 110 opportunities at this event with a sales pipeline value of $35 million dollars.
2) We have already closed $2.5 million of these opportunities and expect another $4 million this quarter.
What are the chances of your event budget being cut or constrained with this response?
How do you measure your event performance?
To learn how to maximize your lead conversion, read Validar's white paper "Drive Higher Sales Conversions: Ask the Right Questions During Lead Capture" and discover how ExpoCard Connect can help capture and qualify leads.
Click on the link at right.
Posted on Tue, Sep 28, 2010 @ 09:53 AM
Republished with permission from Jeff Hurt, the Director of Education and Engagement for Velvet Chainsaw Consulting.
Original post on December 16, 2009 at Midcourse Corrections.
If you could design a meeting based upon how the brain works, what would you come up with? What if associations provided brain-friendly annual conferences?
If you wanted to create a conference environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like today’s conferences, meetings and workshops. If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would design a full day of lectures in general sessions and breakouts. (Just like today’s learning institutions).
What if associations tore down old traditional conference models and started over?
Here are four brain-friendly principles from brain scientists that association leaders and meeting organizers should consider when planning their next annual meeting. (There are many more!)
Passive Listening Versus Movement and Interactivity
1. Your brain is not designed to sit passively for eight hours a day listening to lectures.
In the evolutionary process, our brains developed while working out and walking. The brain still craves that experience. Movement boosts brainpower. Physical activity is cognitive candy.
Suggestion: Conference organizers should encourage presentations that get people up, moving around and require interactivity, not sitting in chairs all day.
Your Short Term Memory
2. Your brain is not designed like a recording device—push record to learn new information and push playback to remember it.
German psychologist and memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus is best known for one of the most depressing facts in education: people usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. The majority of this memory loss occurs within the first few hours after the presentation. Wow, normal conference attendees only recall 10% of what they learn at the annual meeting. That’s low ROI.
The moment of encoding, or learning, is mysterious and complex. We do know that the process is similar to a blender running without a lid. The information enters the blender, is sliced into pieces and splattered all over the insides of our mind. Content and context are stored separately. Recalling that information requires more elaborate encoding in the initial moments of learning.
Suggestion: Conference organizers need to structure and provide emotional arousal, context and meaning which lead to more elaborate encoding and thus better recall.
Adult White Space
3. The brain is not an open vessel that you can constantly pour content into during an eight-hour day and expect it to recall the information at will.
Have you seen the film Mondo Cane? The Italian shockumentary consists of vignettes intended to raise Westerner’s eyebrows. One memorable and disgusting scene shows farmers force-feeding geese to make Pâté de foie gras. They stuff food down the throats of these animals and then fasten a brass ring around their throats, trapping the food inside the digestive tract. Repeatedly jamming them with an oversupply of food eventually creates a stuffed liver pleasing to the world’s chefs. The geese are sacrificed in the name of expediency.
Most conferences try to overstuff their attendees with several days of eight to ten hours of presentations. Subject matter experts shovel data dumps into attendees’ minds thinking more is best. Pushing too much information, without enough time devoted to context, meaning, connecting the dots and digestion, does not nourish the brain. The attendee’s learning is sacrificed in the name of expediency. The brain needs breaks.
Suggestion: Conference organizers need to schedule adult white space: time for attendees to discuss new learnings with each other. They should plan for moderated chats where attendees re-expose each other to the information and share detailed elaborations of their impressions. When attendees spend time in these gabfests sharing their new learnings, retention increases. Brains recall information that is repeated out loud. The more the experience is retold, the more the brain encodes it and the more likely it will be remembered.
Attention Spans And Boring Things
4. The brain does not pay attention to boring things. (I know, you’re saying, “Duh!”)
Research shows that presenters have 30 seconds to grab someone’s attention and only 10 minutes to keep it. Most conference presentations are 60 to 90 minutes long. If keeping someone’s interest in a presentation were a business, it would have an 80%-90% failure rate.
Presenters and conference organizers can help grab attention by ensuring every 10-minute segment is rich with meaning, stories and emotional connections. Connecting each segment to previous segments also helps the brain learn and remember.
Suggestion: Conference organizers should secure speakers that change their content and raise attention every 9 minutes and 59 seconds to restart the attention clock.
These four brain-friendly principles are just some of the things association leaders and meeting professionals can do to create brain-friendly conferences. What others would you add? How can you stimulate learning at your meetings?
Posted on Thu, Sep 16, 2010 @ 08:43 AM
Post authored by Luis A. Lamar
As I travel around the country, I have had the chance to talk to a lot of customers and everyone is trying to figure out what is going on with the economy, and how it will affect their customers, members and employees. There are encouraging signs the economy is on the rebound. Travel is coming back, especially business travel and we have seen the luxury hotels filling up even faster than hotels in other segments. As we try to use the past as our guide, I can’t help wondering if this is a different animal. Are we looking at the new normal?
Everything is different these days. We are seeing a much shorter booking window, but certain customers still hesitate to book the future.
While we are seeing the return of the business traveler and corporate groups, we are sensing a bit of hesitation from the association customer. Why? Their meeting attendance is strong (especially compared to 2009) but the associations are cautious. Is it because they are concerned the number of attendees will not show up? Are they seeing drops in their membership and therefore budgets are being tightened? Are they concerned about how a meeting will look to their attendees and the outside world?
Two years ago, we saw prices collapse. As business returns, prices are starting to rise, lead by hotels in New York City. Knowing that rooms and meeting space will fill soon, I’m curious to hear thoughts from planners who have already benefitted from signing future contracts now. What motivated you to act? What offers were so appealing, or concessions above what you might have received in a strong economy, that influenced you to contract sooner rather than continue to wait? What concessions or added values would entice you, as the planner, to contract now if you haven’t already?
Luis A. Lamar is the Vice President of Sales, Convention & Resort Hotels- The Americas for Marriott International, Inc. To learn more about him, click here.