Bad menu packet presentation: August 2007 Morsel
Published: July 27, 2007
This morsel is not going to be about how food is presented. Instead, it’s about my dissatisfaction with how hotels are presenting their menu packets to us, the customers.
Most of the time, folks e-mail their hotel menu packets, which is fine with me. It is nice having an electronic copy, but only in addition to having a hard copy.
If I am doing several days at the same property, and the hotels expect me to print out a 75- to 100-pg. e-mail, they have another thing coming. And why should they expect clients to pay $55++ for a gallon of coffee when their hefty packets were run off a copier and stapled together? Who has time to sift through 75 to 100 pages? And why aren’t they handing clients a professionally printed menu packet that’s user-friendly?
Hotels, your customers are spending big bucks with you on banquets. The least you could do is spend some money on how your menus are presented. And put tabs on the menu selections so we know where to look. If you are asking me to pay $45++ for a lunch buffet, your thoughtful menu presentation to me should prove why I should pay that price.
And with that, I step off my soapbox.
— Claire R. Gould
Claire R. Gould is the owner of Rx for Catering, LLC, a culinary and logistics company that works globally negotiating and designing menus for meetings and events. Her company has done work for Coca-Cola, IBM, Honeywell and Randstad, among others. Gould teaches and writes about culinary and banquet trends and topics, and publishes a quarterly online newsletter “The Claire Diaries.” If you have any feedback for her, please leave a comment.
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August 1, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I agree with the extensive menus that you have to sift through being a royal pain. It is good to have choices, but give me 3-4 not a dozen. The TABS is a great idea. The cost is acceptable provided there is no charge for the room rental. But the ones that have the room rental on top of that are off my list.
The A/V charges for an LCD projector are really too much. I mean 2-3 days rental and you could have bought it. I know they have salaries to pay but come on. Anyway, I have 3 meeting being planned right now and would love to share my outcomes. One in South Beach, one in West Palm Beach and one in GA.