If you want to book a meeting at sea, instead of at a hotel, here are some differences between the two venues that you should be aware of.

Arrival time: It is common for meeting and event planners to arrive at a hotel a day or two before a big event, but with a cruise ship you can arrive an hour or two before the meeting participants.

Reserving rooms: Unless you charter a ship for your group cruise, you will need to coordinate with the cruise line in advance to secure the meeting space you need on the day and time you need it. Otherwise, another group may already be using the space.

Saving money: The cruise ship includes things like AV equipment and themed décor, so you do not have to budget for these items separately like you do for a hotel. You can either keep the extra cash or use it to offer incentives or fun activities, such as additional onboard amenities or shore excursions.

Promoting differences: A cruise ship offers different options than a hotel, so you can advertise these when promoting the trip. For example, you can mention that participants choose from a vast menu for all three meals, or that there is a wide range of activities available, or that participants will be able to visit several different destinations without extra packing or travel hassle.

Flying can be a real hassle. Not only can flying be more trouble than it is worth, but it can also be very expensive. When businesses have to factor in the cost of round-trip airfare into their incentive travel budgets, they often find they have few resources available to plan exciting entertainment and dining options for travel participants. Because airfare often requires a large percentage of the travel budget, businesses are often faced with the task of making the remaining funds stretch as much as possible. When planning incentive travel, consider an incentive cruise as a reasonable, affordable, and thrilling option with no flying required.

While participants of an incentive cruise do have to get to port, a number of these ports are located within a five hour drive of many of the major cities. At least 50 percent of the population of the U.S. is within a 5 hour drive of a cruise ship's port. Since a ship charter can cost up to 40 percent less than a land venue, such as a hotel or resort, businesses will not have to worry about making their budgets stretch. Exciting incentive travel can be accomplished without having to pay for expensive airfare or deal with the headache of flying.

We all know that plants assist in cleaning indoor air and are nice to look at, but can they really improve meetings in a way that is meaningful and worth the effort?

Plants can be used in both temporary and permanent meeting locations; however, using them at various venues requires meeting planners to transport the plants to different locations and to find a place to store and care for them when not in use. This is going to be too much of a hassle for most meeting planners who already have plenty to manage, but if you plan on-site meetings that are held in regularly used meeting rooms plants may be a viable option.

Aside from cleaning the air and creating a healthier environment, plants are also perfect for creating a more relaxed meeting venue and taking away some of the sterile feeling that is common among nondescript meeting spaces. Dull, drab meeting rooms with little décor and stale air drain the energy of attendees quickly and make for a very long meeting; however, by adding a few well-placed plants to the room, you can create a more welcoming environment that is more comfortable and energetic, which can lead to greater productivity. Plants are also inexpensive, which makes them a much more affordable option for livening up a room than more expensive options, such as new furnishings or artwork.

Any meeting planner who has worked with medical meetings knows it’s a different kind of animal. That includes pharmaceutical meetings as well. However, the guidelines for their meetings have changed again. On first sight they may not make it easier on the planner, but if you look deeper you may find that they make things more efficient by removing choices.

Sure, meetings across the board have changed and rules have become stricter. However, remember that when you remove choices, you remove time spent evaluating things that have already been evaluated by someone else. For instance, if a rule states that you can only have four security guards, then you don’t need to hassle with convincing a client that she needs six.

You could say that stricter rules for pharmaceutical and medical meetings has taken guesswork out of what is best practice for a particular meeting. In fact, best practice in some cases is not even a consideration. In the above case of security personnel, it wouldn’t matter if six were better–you can only have four and that is that. Read the rest of this entry »

Although it may be true that a client could book her own incentive vacation tour to Egypt, making sure that she included everything Egypt has to offer would be difficult without a lot of research. And that is your job, anyway–research the richness of Egypt for future incentive travel, and you will have a pocket of the Pharaoh’s gold in your destination file.

One reason this country is so rich with sightseeing is that so much has been preserved. The Sphinx have sat for thousands of years awaiting for travelers (over 20 miles of them in Luxor!), and they will be there for the next thousand years. Egyptian tombs, temples, statues, hieroglyphs, and other ancient arts and architecture are like no other in the world, so your client would not want to miss important ones just because he didn’t have time to research it all. Read the rest of this entry »