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As the U.S. economy continues its struggle to rebound in 2011, EIBTM reported some encouraging trends for the Meetings and Events Industry in their Annual EIBTM Global Industry Trends and Market Share Report. While not completely out of the woods yet, the report highlights some trends that show significant improvements for the year ahead.
Highlights of the report include:
Is it becoming more difficult to come up with new, exciting meeting venues, unique excursions and entertainment options or enticing destinations? If so, it might be time to take advantage of an untapped resource that just might have been right under your nose all along. As a meeting planner or corporate event planner, you have a built-in focus group just waiting to be tapped for suggestions.
If you work as a meeting planner for a particular company, your colleagues are the perfect group of people to provide suggestions regarding possible meeting venues, what type of entertainment they would like at the next corporate event and which destinations would be most appealing for incentive travel programs. If you are an independent planner, you can still take advantage of participant input by tapping the folks that attend the events you plan.
The folks who attend your meetings and events are exactly who you would want to speak to anyways, since this is the group of people to which you are providing a service and trying to impress. Most meeting and event attendees will be more than happy to participate in making future events more interesting or fun, and they will likely be delighted that they were asked their opinion on the matter.
Create a simple survey to disseminate around the office or at your next event, asking easy questions about venues, entertainment, excursions and destinations that they would find interesting. Giving predetermined options is a good way to avoid having everyone suggest Monaco when your budget would be more fitting for Miami, but even if you provide options from which they should choose, be sure to also leave some space dedicated to their suggestions. You might be surprised with how many great options they come up with that you may have never even considered.
It is no secret that cruise ships are ideal for hosting meetings and conferences. They offer a number of benefits, including all-inclusive pricing, significant cost savings over land-based events, built-in entertainment and stellar meeting facilities. With the recent growth in popularity of river cruises, meeting planners are now beginning to contemplate the feasibility of holding meetings on these smaller vessels that cruise the rivers of North America, South America and Europe. On one hand, river cruise meetings they offer an appealing option that provides a more intimate setting, a unique experience and that much-coveted, all-inclusive pricing, but on the other hand, can they provide the amenities and meeting space required for your event?
River barges and boats, by their nature, are much smaller vessels and are a far cry from the floating city atmosphere of oceangoing vessels. Intimate settings for meals, which are often prepared by and eaten with the captain or the captain’s spouse, limited onboard activities and services, and minimal free space are all characteristics of river cruising. Because of this, planning business meetings to take place during a river cruise will take some research and planning. If you are opting for a larger paddlewheel riverboat cruising a river in the South, you will likely find that holding onboard meetings is a viable option; however, some of the smaller river barges that cruise the rivers of Europe may not have the space available to hold a meeting for more than just a handful of people – and will almost certainly have no audio-visual equipment.
If you are determined to host your next business meeting on a boat, a full-size, oceangoing cruise ship will always be your best bet, but with a little planning and preparation, a river cruise is also possible when planning smaller meetings and events.
If you plan meetings and events for the SMERF (social, military, educational, religious, fraternal) market, you may want to consider adding self-catering accommodation options to the lodgings available for your events. While this is clearly a non-issue if your meeting or event is taking place on a cruise ship or if you are hosting your event at a hotel and offering on-site lodgings, this can be a rather appealing option for other situations. For example, if you are planning a meeting to be held at a community hall or a conference at a convention center, you may want to consider adding self-catering options to the list of lodging possibilities for out-of-town attendees.
One of the main reasons for offering self-catering accommodations when working with the SMERF market is that this type of event participant is more likely to be traveling with their partner or family than other types of event attendees. Accommodations that have kitchen and laundry facilities can make the non-attending partner and other family members feel more at home and allows them to keep food and drinks readily available, rather than having to leave their lodgings every time they want a snack. This also allows your SMERF participants to enjoy the convenience and savings of dining in for some meals, if they prefer.
Seasite.com makes it easy for event planners to source and plan a cruise event. They provide search tools that help you identify the right ship, meeting space grids that show you how the ship fits your needs, and other great planning resources.
While we would all like to believe that if you plan it they will come, that is not always the case with corporate events and meetings. Employees and executives have so many meetings and events to attend in any given week that it can sometimes take a little extra effort to ensure that they will show up at yours. Fortunately, there are several simple ways to increase the appeal of your corporate events and business meetings, which will increase attendance and show your client or boss that you know what it takes to deliver the results they need.
Here are five tried and true ways to increase attendance at corporate meetings and events:
1. Invite an enticing guest speaker. Whether it is a trendy guru or a respected leader in your field, adding an enticing guest speaker to the line-up will significantly enhance your event’s appeal. 2. Choose an appealing venue. Folks grow tired of going to the same venue for meetings and events repeatedly. Switch things up by opting for a museum, theme park or cruise ship to increase interest. 3. Serve alcohol. While you might not want to serve alcohol during the annual stakeholders’ meeting, you can certainly arrange for a cocktail social afterwards. Alcohol always seems to increase the appeal of any event. 4. Arrange exciting entertainment options. People love to be entertained, which makes this an easy way to get folks interested in attending your event. 5. Stay in touch prior to the event and ask for confirmations. Send out regular reminders and updates as the date approaches to keep your invitees interested and involved. And, do not be afraid to ask them to confirm their attendance prior to the event.
The general public has become much more interested in where companies large and small hold their meetings and events. Whether it is a local retailer or a major corporation, the very public follies of some well-known companies have increased public scrutiny when it comes to the money spent on events and travel, as well as the destinations chosen for corporate meetings and events. Cities known for extravagance and gambling – such as Las Vegas – are no longer an easy choice, even though these cities offer stellar meeting facilities, an array of dining and entertainment options, and well-priced accommodations and transportation.
Many companies continue to hold corporate meetings and events in cities seen as at least a little sinful, but they do so knowing that they will likely receive negative feedback from at least some of their stakeholders. Aside from concerns about public perception, holding meetings at hotels and resorts that have casinos is a great option that offers many benefits. Most of these venues have a variety of restaurants onsite, offer built-in entertainment options, provide great group accommodation discounts and have well-equipped meeting spaces. However, there is still the problem of public perception that must be considered.
Corporate meeting planners know that their participants tend to love casinos and all that comes along with this type of venue. Many of these planners have found an option that provides luxurious accommodations, cuisine for every palate, nightly entertainment, great group rates and the fun of onsite gaming without the negative perception that comes with casino hotels. The answer is a simple one: cruise ships. While most cruise ships have casinos, they have managed to avoid the negative reputation held by venues in Atlantic City, Las Vegas and other gaming towns.
Because cruise ships with casinos are not perceived the same as land-based venues with casinos, they are the perfect option for corporate meeting planners with clients concerned about public perception.
Cruises have always had an air of luxury of extravagance, dating back to when the first cruise lines began to offer elegant vacation options, rather than simply providing seafaring voyages for transportation purposes. While most people still consider a cruise a luxury experience, present day cruises are actually quite cost-effective and convenient for incentive travel packages, meetings at sea, conferences and trade shows, and other corporate events.
Aside from the cost savings and easy of planning that cruises provide, here are ten additional advantages of choosing a cruise for your next event or travel award:
1. Cruises offer personalized, attentive service, which enhances participants’ experience. 2. Cruises offer inclusive packages that assist planners in sticking to the defined travel budget. 3. Cruises provide a fulfilling, exciting travel experience for employees at a variety of income levels. 4. This exciting travel option is highly motivating for staff and encourages increased performance. 5. The self-contained environment makes event planning easy and convenient. 6. Planners can offer their participants multiple destinations with no additional effort. 7. Sharing an exciting travel experience is ideal for teambuilding. 8. Cruises offer all of the luxuries of resort hotels with the added value of foreign destinations. 9. Entertainment options abound, providing participants with plenty of activity options that the planner does not have to organize. 10. A contained environment ensures that more attendees will show up to onboard meetings and events.
Newly launched Seasite.com provides 24/7 access to all cruise brands, and the most content-rich and searchable database for the cruise industry.
Miami, FL (Vocus/PRWEB ) January 21, 2010 — Planning a group cruise requires searching for detailed ship information and not always finding what you need – even on the cruise lines’ own web sites. Now, with Seasite.com, the first cruise portal for meetings and events, group organizers can find all the ship data they need in one place – at no cost.
"I’ve bookmarked Seasite.com – it’s invaluable in selecting the right ship for a group and to verify it’s a good fit before I present it to my client,” said Millie Evans, President/CEO Alliance Incentives and Meetings. "And for operational planning, it has all the info I need – which isn’t on cruise line web sites.”
Seasite.com provides 24/7 access to all cruise brands, and the most content-rich and searchable database for the cruise industry, so that planners can:
1. Find ship data never before offered online or in print, such as: - Meeting/function room capacities - Dining room seating, and details for private group dining - Outdoor group function areas - A/V equipment lists 2- Search, compare, and save favorite cruises; then create one RFP and submit it to multiple cruise lines. (Group pricing is the same as booking direct.)
3- See the cruise lines most committed to groups, and search their mini-sites (all laid out the same — when you’re familiar with one, you’re familiar with all!)
4- Search by ship name for a chronological list of future Itineraries and Basic Ship Information, and find it faster than a brochure.
5- Search for a cruise anywhere in the world by any date range (as short as several days or as long as several months). Sort your results by meetings-specific criteria.
6- Refer to the Knowledge Center to answer all your questions, including these:
7- Discover a list of "Cruise Gems” – those rare, hard to find, short cruises.
"Everyone who plans group travel should take a good look, and bookmark Seasite.com if they want to simplify cruise sourcing and planning” said Jo Kling, CEO Seasite.com.
For more information on Seasite.com, A Landry & Kling Company, visit www.seasite.com or call 888-713-1371.
About Seasite.com/Landry & Kling Seasite.com is designed for meeting and event planners who want more control in the cruise sourcing and planning process. It’s the fastest and easiest way for group organizers to master the world of cruising, building on all that’s been learned by Landry & Kling, who are credited with being the first distribution channel between the cruise industry and corporate America. Now, 28 years since their startup, they have responded to changing times by creating Seasite.com, with innovative cruise sourcing tools that enable meeting planners and other travel intermediaries to be more pro-active and confident in booking cruises. Seasite group pricing is the same as booking direct, with the advantage of impartial Cruise Advisors to assist as needed.
When planning meetings and events, the venue is often the first selection made in the planning process. Selecting the right venue that has the amenities and meeting rooms to meet your clients’ needs is paramount to a successful event and must be determined before other aspects of the meeting can be planned. Due to the importance of meeting venues to your event planning process, using the same venues on a regular basis and developing long-term relationships with your contacts at these meeting venues will make your job easier, will ensure that your client receives topnotch service and can save money.
When you use the same venues regularly you will become familiar with exactly what they offer, will know what to expect and will benefit from venue staff being able to anticipate your needs. You can also receive discounts for booking multiple meetings and may even get priority for popular dates. When you build relationships with meeting venue staff, you will also naturally begin to build relationships with local vendors and will likely get tips from the staff on which vendors provide exceptional service or great prices. When you can call a local caterer and tell them that you were referred by your contact at a local hotel with which they often do business, you are much more likely to get a great price and great service, making your job easier and helping you keep your clients happy.
