Plan Your Meetings

Working Overseas: January 2008 Morsel

Top of the year to everyone!

I decided to start my 2008 morsels with an interesting experience I had in Prague last November. A client hired Rx Catering to go to Prague to oversee a weeklong meeting. I did the pre-menu planning and got the BEOs back with financial quotes in euros. “Interesting,” I thought, “I didn’t realize that Czechs were on the euro system, but OK, euros are good.”

Halfway through the meeting, I start going through the banquet checks — they weren’t in euros; the checks were in the Czech koruna. So, I start converting the koruna over to euros to make sure we were getting charged correctly. I never had this happen before; I was quoted in one currency, but billed in another. Fine by me, as long as it all converted over correctly. Did it?

Nope, not at all, because the hotel calculated everything at the hotel’s exchange rate, adding in their service fees for making the conversion, as if I was a guest off the street exchanging money. Which, by the end of the day, was adding another $5,000 US, minimum, to my clients bill.

How did we get around this? Because the contract and BEOs were signed off at the agreed rate, and there was nothing in my client’s contract saying that final billing would be done in Czech koruna at the hotel’s exchange rate, I was able to go back to the hotel and politely tell them these conversions needed to equal out at the agreed Euro rate. Which they politely, but reluctantly, did. End of story.

— 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.