It’s that time of year, again, when we gladly share some of the most important meeting planning tips for successful events. Here are 12 tips to keep in your Top Drawer when it comes to planning your next meeting.

  1. Agenda. You have to lay out the plans from arrival through departure before you can begin to check availability. Hotels must know what your plans are from starting to ending times of each event, to the number of guests in each meeting and banquet room, to how you wish to have the room set up. Without this information, it is impossible to get a quote on availability or pricing.
  2. Be flexible. Have a few date options to present to hotels when you begin searching for meeting space and guest rooms. You’d be surprised that by moving the meeting dates a week or two earlier/later, hotels may have a hole to fill and pricing may be greatly reduced. Try to always have a variety of dates when you start looking at hotels for meetings.
  3. Check the city’s convention and visitors’ bureaus websites’  to make sure you are not planning a meeting in a city where there is already a large convention taking place. Avoid crowds and choose cities and dates when there is nothing else going on at the same time. Don’t get lost in the crowd!
  4. Cast a wide net initially. Look at a bunch of cities and a variety of hotels when you first start your search. Compare pricing and you’ll find that there may be a particular city where the pricing is lower over your dates. There are always interesting things to see and do in every destination, so find a city and choose an activity for your group that will make your guests excited about where your meeting will take place.
  5. Look at meeting space on hotels’ websites when you receive proposals. Hotels are anxious to get you to sign a contract and what they may be offering may not be ideal for your group size. Look at square footage and meeting room dimensions to avoid being packed in like sardines or sitting in a rectangular room versus a square shaped room. And always avoid rooms with airwalls; noise can be heard between air walls. Ideally, look for meeting rooms with solid walls.
  6. Find out how many of the guest rooms the hotel can offer have the bed types or views you are seeking. Typically, hotels offer ROH, or run of house rooms, which means a variety of rooms with one or two beds, small to large room sizes, and views that may not be so great or really lovely. If bed types and room sizes are important to your group, make sure you get a rate quote for the types of rooms that you wish for your guests.
  7. Seek out hotels that match the size of your group. If your group is small, stay away from large properties where you will be lost in the crowd. Ask hotels to provide you with meeting and banquet space that is located all together, not spread out or on different floors. Stay away from having guests use elevators or escalators to travel from room to room; make the selection of meeting/banquet space as convenient as possible for your group, and for you, the meting planner!
  8. Set up a site visit. This is the most crucial part of planning a meeting, because what you see on the web isn’t always reality. It’s vital to go and walk through the hotel and stay overnight and taste the food and experience the service before signing a contract. Most hotels will offer one complimentary night’s stay for a site visit. If it’s impossible to get there, ask the hotel sales manager to set up a virtual site visit, where the sales manager walks around the hotel with you on FaceTime. Don’t skip this, ever!
  9. When contracting, request that none of your direct competitors are meeting at the hotel over your dates, request a rebooking clause, in case you need to cancel your event, so you may use the cancellation payment toward a rebooked meeting, and request a resell clause, if you don’t use all the rooms in your contract, the hotel will sell those rooms to other guests to offset any attrition you could owe.
  10. Get very close with your conference services manager as early as possible, way before your meeting will begin. Your relationship with this person is key to your success and the happiness of your executives and guests. If your conference services manager is not communicating often enough or handling you with kid gloves, request to be reassigned to another conference services manager quickly. There is nothing more important that having a close-knit relationship with your conference services manager.
  11. Set up a pre-con and post-con, which stands from Pre-Conference and Post-Conference meeting. Your conference services manager will make the arrangements with everyone servicing your event, from reservations, to banquets, to audio visuals, etc. This meeting takes place ideally the day before your guests arrive or the morning they are arriving. It allows you to go through every day, day by day, time by time, to make sure everyone is on the same page and nothing gets lost in communication. Without this necessary meeting, you chance that what you have planned is not what the hotel is prepared to deliver. And, once the meeting is over, reconvene before you depart to go through the event and fix what didn’t work and request refunds, and preferably to thank the staff and reward those who stood out with excellent customer service with a monetary gratuity and hand written thank you notes!
  12. Survey your guests. Find out what they liked or didn’t like. This will be so helpful when you go to plan your next meeting. Maybe they thought the sessions were too long, or not enough down time, or the food wasn’t great. Take the negatives and the positives and use this information to make every meeting you plan better and better.

 

We’d be remiss if you weren’t reminded that our service is complimentary. Rely on us to search hotels, negotiate a superior hotel contract, and guide you toward a well-prepared and most successful event. You are our most important asset, and we look forward to providing you with excellent customer service in the coming years. Best wishes for a Happy New Year!