Nobody likes lawyers until they need one.
With sincerest apologies to all of the fine attorneys out there, that sage little bit of snarky wisdom illustrates how litigious our society has become, and how important legal eagles are to surviving in it.
In this issue of Meetings West, we’re fortunate enough to have an all-star team of meetings industry lawyers who have offered to share their expertise on how you can actually avoid having to procure their services.
Hopefully, if you take our “10 Legal Pits You Can Avoid” story to heart you won’t find yourself in a bind—by sidestepping some of the top meetings legal landmines.
Moving on, our April issue also features a feature story about the fat and sassy luxury hotel market.
According to statistics from Smith Travel Research, top-tier brands are grazing in high clover these days, rolling around in the highest average occupancy level (71.4 percent) and the highest occupancy increase (2.3 percent) of any hotel segment when comparing numbers from 2006 to 2005.
The upper-echelon brands also posted the largest gain in average daily rate of any segment: up by 9 percent to hover just shy of $272 per night. That’s a lot of Grey Poupon!
Joining the luxury segment in industry swagger, Native American gaming venues and their ancillary products—such as golf courses and entertainment—are on a surge, becoming a $2.7 billion industry, according to National Indian Gaming Association numbers.
Not content to rest on their leisure and transient travel laurels, however, these properties are making inroads into the meetings industry, and are upping the ante by offering more-sophisticated amenities.
With such an increasing number of quality venues available for your meetings, conventions and events, narrowing down the options is becoming more of a challenge.
To help your site-selection process, Meetings West annually polls its readers to find out what Western hotels and resorts have risen to the top of their lists during the past year. This is your chance to give some love to the meeting facilities that have done right by you and your groups over the last year. You can vote online at www.meetingstoday.com/awards.
We’ll publish the results in our August issue.
Finally, run your eyes down to the bottom of this page. We’ve added a new feature to the Inbox section by inviting meetings industry ListServ MeCo, or Meetings Community, to contribute some of the most interesting questions and answers it has posted recently. In fact, the bottom half of this page is for meeting planner input and resources, so make sure to send your observations and tips to us at editor@meetingsmedia.com.
Enjoy this jam-packed April issue, and huzzah for spring!
