The pounding beat from the disco below their rooms is keeping attendees awake; children are dashing outside the meeting rooms in a race to get to the pool; or, worst of all, your corporate group’s competitor has booked the hotel for a sales meeting at the same time as yours.
What’s a planner to do?
Fortunately, there are many precautions that can be taken to avoid, or at least cope with, potential problems like these. It just takes a bit of forethought, an eagle eye during site inspections and the knowledge to be able to negotiate certain contract clauses.
Noisy Neighbors
Although the noise from a disco can sometimes be solved by moving to a different guest room and probably only affects a limited number of attendees, another type of noise could be more difficult to deal with.
It’s what Joan Eisenstodt, chief strategist of Eisenstodt Associates, calls the proverbial brass band next door.
“All of us have had the experience of having a serious meeting of some kind and you are in a room that’s divisible and a band comes in to rehearse next door or there’s a speaker who’s very loud or there’s lots of clapping,” she says.
According to Eisenstodt, this kind of problem ultimately stems from a lack of communication between the planner and the hotel.
“A lot of times hotels will not put in the names of the meeting rooms they will be using. They’ll just put that you’ll get 'X' amount of meeting space,” she says. “The hotels want the ability to move groups into space that will make more sense for the hotel, and they don’t always look at what the groups are doing in those rooms.”
She gives the example of booking a group knowing that the program will involve Native American drummers. If there’s a medical meeting with serious lectures in the next room, there could be a problem. However, it’s a problem that can be avoided if proper measures are taken.
“Up front we can do a bit better in communicating what our program will be, especially if it’s going to need a lot of quiet or be disruptive to somebody else,” Eisenstodt says.
She recommends that if planners need a meeting with a lot of quiet time, it should be stipulated in the RFP.
James M. Goldberg, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who specializes in hotel contracts, recommends that planners put a “quiet enjoyment or non-disturbance clause” into the contract, but cautions that it may only partially address the problem.
“If there’s some kind of noise or disruption, what do you do about it?” he says. “At that point the best thing you can do is negotiate something with the hotel to see what kind of resolution can be reached.”
An important thing to ask up front is whether or not the hotel has full-time security staff who will handle noisy situations that might be disruptive to a group.
Conflicts and Competition
Another type of disturbance can arise from conflicting groups meeting in the hotel at the same time. As an extreme example, Eisenstodt says she once heard about a religious group booked into a hotel during the same dates as a pornographic organization.
And then there’s the danger of coming face-to-face with a company’s competition.
“I suggest putting a provision requiring notification of all other meetings and events going on at the same time,” Goldberg says. “Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time. They can’t have any other pharmaceutical company [in-house] because of corporate espionage or whatever. They frequently put that in the contract.”
Kids in the Hall
In some cases, a property that caters primarily to leisure guests might present problems for a group requiring a peaceful business environment.
“If groups are going to a leisure destination to have a meeting, they’re putting themselves at a higher risk [for distractions]”, says Kelly Bagnell, an attorney with Dykema, a law firm in Dallas. “If it’s a leisure destination and the pool is next to the meeting room, they could have trouble.”
She says that when she attended a meeting in Las Vegas, she couldn’t hear the noise but could see a swimming pool and was distracted by the activity that was taking place.
She adds that planners conducting site inspections must make absolutely certain that the facilities are going to work for their group. Otherwise, they need to look for another place.
Negotiations expert and meeting planner Nancy Norman, president of The Norman Group in Hopkinton, Mass., agrees.
“When I go on a site visit, I look very carefully at my surroundings,” she says. “If I’m going to do a corporate meeting and I see a lot of mothers walking around with baby strollers, then I know it’s not the kind of place for my group.”
But just because it may be a leisure resort, and just because there may be a lot of families with children, doesn’t mean the place should be totally off-limits.
In fact, some leisure properties have been designed partly with the meetings market in mind, so that the two types of businesses can peacefully coincide. And those resorts that have done this might be a great choice, especially for those groups with attendees who would like to bring their families along.
At the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., for example, the meeting rooms and convention space are at the polar opposite end from the waterpark and theme park.
“You can go to a meeting and never be exposed to the waterpark, and you can be a leisure guest and never be exposed to a meeting,” says Kevin Shanley, corporate director of sales. “We support the design of the resort by very effective signage that leads people to the appropriate places.”
Everything is under one roof, and 360 of the resort’s 756 rooms are adjacent to the convention center. The convention center also includes a restaurant that turns into a nightclub, but to isolate the noise it was placed in a separate building that is surrounded by another building.
Still, Shanley says there is a perception that meetings will be difficult because it’s a leisure destination.
But “once people are here, they find out that the disruption and the distraction just aren’t here,” he says.
Vegas for Business
Although a conflict between business and leisure has traditionally been associated with Las Vegas, the city can be conducive for serious meetings, according to Michael Massari, senior vice president of meeting sales and operations for Caesars Entertainment Corp., which operates 10 hotels in Las Vegas, including Caesar’s Palace, Planet Hollywood, Flamingo Las Vegas and Rio.
“In the late ’90s I was trying to get the pharmaceutical industry to start using Las Vegas,” he says. “At that time, there had never been a pharmaceutical launch in Nevada.”
One way he found to promote Las Vegas was to emphasize that attendees in Las Vegas have plenty of options for entertainment during the evening, leaving plenty of time for daytime sessions.
“People know that if they all miss their meetings they’ll never be able to go back to Las Vegas,” Massari says, adding that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly sold on the concept, now comprising 25 percent of meeting business at his hotels.
Like Kalahari, the hotels that are part of Caesars Entertainment are laid out with meetings in mind. The meeting space is usually a separate area of the property, far removed from the casino.
In the end, it all comes down to carefully qualifying the resort and its suitability for meetings, not just from a facility standpoint but from the staff as well.
“You should be working with people who know how to get things done,” Massari says. “There are resorts that are for business and resorts that aren’t for business, and you have to be mindful of that.”
Judy Jacobs has been writing for meeting and travel industry publications for over 20 years.
