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.

In a previous post, we discussed how simple it can be to plan a romantic river cruise wedding if the opportunity to plan a wedding every came your way. There are plenty of other types of events and travel that are perfect for river cruises, including incentive travel, executive retreats and small corporate events. Aside from these obvious options, river cruises are particularly well-suited for fundraising events, social gatherings and other events that call for a more intimate setting.

If you are planning a fundraiser for a non-profit organization or for a charitable cause that your corporation supports, a dinner river cruise is an excellent option that attendees will enjoy and can prove to be a huge moneymaker. If your target donors are higher-end, you may also consider planning a weekend or multiple day river cruise. The donors will appreciate having the opportunity to support a worthy cause by partaking in something more unique and enticing than a typical gala in a hotel ballroom.

River cruises are also ideal for small corporate events, such as meet and greets, small award ceremonies, celebrations or client appreciation cocktail parties. There are river cruises available just about anywhere there is a river, making this an affordable option that can be organized locally or at an appealing, faraway location, depending on your event budget and the travel availability of your participants.

To make planning group cruises easy and convenient, check out the information and tools available on Seasite.com.

Meeting and event planners often find themselves being asked to plan a variety of social and business events, regardless of their niche. Because of this, it is always a good idea to have a few tricks up your sleeve for when you choose to accept these projects. While you might be a corporate event planner who never anticipates planning a wedding, you never know when one of your best clients might ask for a favor or when uncertain economic times might encourage you to expand your service offerings. Therefore, having some unique ideas for weddings in the back of your mind might prove useful at some point in your career.

For a truly romantic, intimate setting for a wedding or vow renewal ceremony, river cruises are an excellent option. Whether opting for a small ship, a barge or an ultra-romantic steamboat, couples will have a memorable wedding day when they choose a river cruise wedding. This affordable option allows them to combine their ceremony and honeymoon in one price package and offers the opportunity for family and friends to join them for just the ceremony or for the full journey. Wedding river cruises can take place in Canada, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the South and the Great Lakes, or on one of Europe’s many rivers, depending on the couple’s preferred destination and budget.

Planning a river cruise wedding – even if you have never planned a wedding – is easy and convenient with the group cruise planning tools at Seasite.com.

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 »