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 Keeping the Peace
How to ensure an acceptable environment for meetings
By Judy Jacobs
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." Read More...
Men at Work
Another type of noise disturbance can arise from a hotel renovation project or construction in the neighborhood where the property is located. One way that planners can deal with this is to ask when the hotel's next renovation project is planned.
“You put language into the contract so that the hotel will notify you of the scope of any planned renovation ahead of time and give you the schedule for the completion of the project and the impact on the function space,” says negotiations expert and meeting planner Nancy Norman, president of The Norman Group in Hopkinton, Mass. Read More...
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