Plan Your Meetings

Another inspiring story from New Orleans: This one is from Brian Panozzo, general manager of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter.

During the Katrina crises, the hotel was evacuating guests and matching them up with staff members who had cars. Employee Norma Valdez was sent off with these instructions: “Do whatever the guest wants.”

Meanwhile, the corporate staff moved to Dallas, where Panozzo was working at the time, and the general manager started to became concerned when no one had heard from Norma in two days.

Finally, she called.

The general manager asked, “Norma, where y’at?”
She said, “I’m in West Virginia.”
“What are you doing in West Virginia?”
Norma replied, “You told me to do whatever the guest wanted, and she wanted to go to West Virginia.”

Todd Whalley, the director of sales for Louisiana’s Northshore Tourist & Convention Commission, was in Atlanta in February for a PYM event and gave us an update on New Orleans. He also told us a touching story from MPI’s Professional Education Conference (PEC) in New Orleans, Jan. 20-24, 2007, and we asked him if we could share it with our readers. Here it is…

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A little trip to the 9th Ward

I had signed up for the PEC President Elect leadership program on Saturday morning and it included a trip to do some work at the Habitat Musicians Village. Most of us on the Gulf Coast have been living this to one level or another — and I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I hadn’t been down to the 9th Ward since relatively soon after the storms — and their double flooding. First time, I was reminded of 1945 Berlin, a history channel flashback of sorts.

When we arrived, I was in the presence of 75 of the most impressive meeting planners in the business. They came from around the world to help us while helping themselves to education and some very fun networking — both of which we were known for, before the storms. Now, I was hoping we were still known for it but we have had our self doubts. Crime, political embarrassments and stupid sound bytes have hurt our reputation as the city that care forgot. As we were traveling, I was pressed into service as a step-on guide (being the only president elect on board that would know) to discuss what the spray paint markings on the homes meant, and about how high the water was at different places. I was amazed at how much I had forgotten in 18 months, and how hard it was to explain that if the levees had held, none of this would’ve happened. Block after block.

After arriving, I was surprised that it wouldn’t be a photo op with these VIP — the staff said hello, discussed safety, and handed us shovels and wheelbarrows. We started digging post holes for the backyard fences for the row of homes everyone has seen on TV. The Habitat Homes stood in a row at attention — in a rainbow of colors that would have made the Vieux Carre Commission need a sedative or an “old fashioned” or both.

We worked for a few hours, and these representatives from Fortune 500 companies that plan their multi-million dollar meetings struggled to dig a hole that was three feet deep in the clay of the Upper 9th Ward, before the water turned it into little swimming pools. They busted their butts.

As their reward, we drove over to the Lower 9th Ward afterwards. To my eyes, it looked much better. The street lights worked. There were no cars, refrigerators, or even houses and boats in the road — it was surprisingly clean. There were even a couple of stores open — even one sports store with Saints gear! Of course, the houses looked about the same, but you have to get used to lower expectations these days. When the escorts suggested I say something, and I turned around to address the folks, they were all tearing up. I know how much they had sacrificed to be here — and how important their visit was to our city.

I knew they deserved to see the truth — that we have two stories and two cities. One basically untouched and ready to host citywide conventions tomorrow, while the other will most likely never be the same.

I didn’t make excuses. I told them that this was the flip side of the coin, and the best thing they could do was bring their meetings here. We are ready in the CBD and the French Quarter, but we all OWN the other areas, too. It’s hard to not forget that people still live here — or dream about coming back to this.

Then I told them a couple of true, frank and mildly amusing anecdotes from my own family’s experiences. I didn’t want to change the subject or gloss over the destruction — everyone deserves the truth — but they deserve to smile a bit, too. And they did.

What I didn’t realize is if we forgot to care, no one else had. These companies and people care a lot. We have a lot of people pulling for us. And not just for the Saints.

— Todd Whalley

Boardroom – A room set aside for the meetings of a company’s board of directors.

Bored – Made weary with repetition, tedium or dullness.

In an earlier post, I confessed to my fascination with words and definitions. While editing the “Dream Meetings” feature in our upcoming issue, I thought a lot about every planner’s challenge — to create interesting meeting environments. Even corporate planners are expected to break everyone out of the boardroom. This line of thought, obviously, led me to “bored” room (or how to avoid them).

“Boardroom” presentations are an important part of the business and government world. Brevity and clarity are often cited as the keys to presenting to senior corporate executives, potential clients or government officials. The use of visuals has become commonplace in business presentations. Respecting these basics, a planner is free to embellish — by creating a more relaxing or exciting meeting room, adding refreshing breaks, and presenting pre- and post-meeting events.

The boardroom’s origins can be traced to Ancient Greece and Aristotle’s The Rhetoric, the book upon which modern speaking principles are based. Aristotle emphasized the importance of the audience, and saw effective speaking composed of three parts — Ethos (credibility of the speaker), Pathos (arguments appealing to the emotions), and Logos (factual data). All good things to keep in mind when planning the next meeting for your corporate board … maybe challenge them with a copy of the ancient sage’s book.

Or, for something a little lighter, try humor. Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Boardroom: Using Humor in Business Speaking, by Michael Iapoce claims to be the first book to offer detailed advice on the effective use of humor in business situations such as presentations, meetings or seminars. The author is a speechwriter who has written for the CEOs of AT&T, Xerox, Monsanto, and the Bank of America, as well as comedy for entertainers such as Rodney Dangerfield.

We’d like to hear your ideas for making sure boardrooms are not “bored” rooms.

It’s not just the New Year that has everyone thinking about fitness. Well before January, we were seeing hotel chains such as Kimpton pushing in-room yoga baskets and healthy meeting breaks. In-room workout stations have been around for more than a year, too. 

The Hilton Personal Performance Study, released ages ago in 2003, launched the trend when it released figures proving business travelers who worked out on the road performed 61 percent better than non-exercisers. (Incidentally, its findings that performance abilities decreased significantly with less than six hours of sleep launched the much-heralded bedding-and-everything-else wars.) And with more cities banning smoking in public areas and big-league corporations giving up trans-fats, 2007 is shaping up to be the healthiest year in a long time.

So get with it! The health and wellness trend is just starting to hit its stride. And with a rapidly aging and largely overweight population, the United States has a potentially huge market for meetings and events integrating mind-body awareness and activities (no pun intended).

We’re not saying you need to book clients into a hotel for a full health check-up or redesign the office to boost employee wellness, but it couldn’t hurt to research heart-healthy options for your clients.

Athletic-Minded Traveler is a fee-based, online resource with tips on everything from finding the best local hotel gyms to identifying healthy restaurants in your price range; it also has a corporate services division. Personal trainers are expanding their sphere of influence, catering to the corporate market, and hotels, such as the Houstonian, are using in-house personal trainers to create customized physical challenges and competitions for groups.

Now don’t forget to feng shui your space and clean your aura. Happy (and healthy) New Year!

The National Foreign Trade Council estimates the United States has lost $31 billion in international business between 2002 and 2004 due to tightened entry regulations that went into effect post-9/11. Bloomberg News predicts new U.S. visa requirements will mean even bigger losses as companies abroad choose to meet in countries that are easier to enter.

If you are a planner dealing with international meetings and events, let us know how U.S. visa requirements have changed the way your clients do business.

Need validation for what you do for a living? A recent story in none other than The New York Times used “God” as a synonym for “meeting planner,” kind of. The article, Event Planning, Doing-the-Impossible Division, recounts the often hair-raising, last-minute rearrangements that make meeting planners seem like miracle workers: A meeting for 500 moved from South Carolina to Texas, only hours before it was to start, to get out of a hurricane’s path; an ill performer replaced with another first-class act, booked at the last minute to go on before an audience of 1,500 sales representatives. Not all things can be worked out: The power goes out at a particularly precarious moment (read the story) during the closing session of a national sales meeting and, alas, the event planner admits, finally, that her powers are limited — maybe.

Have you ever felt like God on the job? Tell us your hair-raising story.

Ever since Michael Jackson took shelter in Dubai, it seems as if the city’s hospitality industry has been racing to become an international Neverland Ranch, with wacky multi-million- and billion-dollar projects such as palm-shaped island resorts, festival cities … even a marine world.

Plans for the $500-million Hydropolis Undersea Resort in Dubai, however, have stalled. Fans of sleeping with the fishes needn’t worry, though. Bruce Jones, head of U.S. Submarines (builder of custom luxury subs), is planning to build a Poseidon Mystery Island off the coast of northeastern Fiji. The world’s first bottom-of-the-sea luxury resort is scheduled to open by September 2008.

Check out the promo film: