Season’s Greetings from ConferenceDirect!
Your ConferenceDirect Associates and Staff wish you a wonderful holiday season, and all good wishes for health and prosperity in the year ahead. May 2007 bring contentment and happiness to all of us.
President’s Message
Data and Deals and December
By Brian Stevens
December is a particularly busy time. With so much going on personally and professionally, I’m surprised people still make time to read – including this newsletter. The good news is that more people are meeting than ever before in North America. The mixed news – for people planning, staging, and attending meetings – is that hotels underdeveloped at the beginning of the decade and now, with an increased demand, we’re clearly in a so-called “seller’s market.” Many hotels are now enjoying a rebound effect, courtesy of the economic law of supply and demand.
But there’s some good ways to save money right now, if you know how to use these conditions to your advantage.
ConferenceDirect books more than 4000 meetings each year and, as such, has access to data that most of our readers would find unattainable. For fun, and using our database, I’ve put together eight factoid-style questions (and answers) we sourced from our database of meetings. Perhaps you’ll enjoy testing your industry knowledge, and if so, don’t look at the answers which follow until you’ve answered all 8 questions.
- Which cities are the 3 most popular destinations booked in 2006?
- Which cities are the 3 highest room rate destinations?
- What 3 months have the lowest room rate for meetings?
- What 3 months have the highest room rate for meetings?
- Which night of the week is the lowest occupied?
- Which night of the week is highest occupied?
- Rank the following cities in terms of occupancy? Houston,Dallas, Kansas City, New York, Boston, Atlanta.
- In Chicago for example which is there strongest month and weeks?
ANSWERS
- Miami, New York, Los Angeles
- New York, Miami, Washington DC
- July, May, August
- October, November, January
- Sunday
- Saturday
- From highest to lowest... New York, Houston, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Kansas City
- First two weeks of October
So what can we learn from the data above?
Most importantly, that you can still get deals. This current seller’s market should last about two more years, but it’s not really a seller’s market in places running a 65% annual occupancy. And even ‘hot’ markets like Chicago have very cold times in the first quarter each year.
Another way to save money is to look at day of the week patterns. As the song says, “What a difference a day makes” when you move a meeting from starting on Tuesday night to starting on Sunday night. We find that, in some markets, day of the week patterns are more important than ever before.
Ask your ConferenceDirect Associate how we can further save you money when booking meetings but making slight changes in day of the week patterns, time of the year patterns, or desirable, but less-occupied cities.
Though December is a busy time for each of us personally, it’s actually a particularly good time to plan a future meeting. Hotels are exceptionally motivated to. Thank you for helping ConferenceDirect have another banner year and we wish each of you a healthy and happy 2007.
10 Technology Predictions for the Meetings Industry
By Corbin Ball, CMP, MS
“The price of computation has dropped 42% per year over 60 years — a trillion-fold fall since 1940.”
Bill Nordhaus, Yale
Technology will continue to evolve at a remarkable pace. Computers will get smaller and cheaper; processors will get faster; batteries will hold a charge longer; displays will have better resolution and be more flexible; data projectors will get smaller, cheaper and brighter; and broadband Internet will get faster and ubiquitous. Experts predict a doubling of performance tied to price every 18 months into the next decade. The phrase “faster, better and cheaper” will continue to apply to most of the technology products we buy.
Technology is revolutionizing business in general, and, specifically, the meeting industry. We will see many developments in the next few years, including:
- Wi-Fi and broadband Internet will be in nearly all public meeting space: The rate of Wi-Fi deployment in convention centers and large meeting hotels is skyrocketing. Even McDonalds provides “free” Wi-Fi access.
- More mobile products. With access to wireless broadband (see above), today’s cell phones will evolve to long-lasting mini-PDA phones that will can access high-speed Internet access through multiple channels including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and even faster wireless formats. We are seeing a number of products that being developed on these mobile platforms for the meetings industry including mobile registration, networking, surveys, audience response, interactive programs, electronic attendee lists, product directories, lead retrieval and more.
- We will see tablet PCs develop as a platform to manage meeting specifications and site inspections.
- RFID (radio frequency identification), the barcode of the future, will work their way into a number of lead retrieval, access verification, and attendance tracking systems in the next few years, despite concerns regarding privacy.
- Web services (.NET) are emerging as the new platform for meetings technology products. The benefit is that it becomes much easier for different programs (for example online registration and housing) to work together even if not made by the same company. As there is a huge range of web-based technology products for meeting planners (more than 1,100 categorized links at www.corbinball.com/bookmarks), this interoperability between programs will be of significant benefit as it will allow the planner to more easily mix-and-match different applications.
- Voluntary standards will continue to make slow but steady progress. APEX (Accepted Practices Exchange), lead by the Convention Industry Council (www.conventionindustry.org) in North America, will provide technology standards in this next year for: resumes/work orders, request for proposals (RFPs), housing, and meeting/site profiles. It will only be by adopting standards that the meetings industry can truly digitize its business process. This will reduce laborious clerical inputting and proofreading that both meeting planners and hoteliers/convention service managers are now required to do for nearly every meeting.
- Procurement will increasingly drive more meeting purchasing decisions, especially for large corporations. Combined meetings consolidation/attendee management software will save large companies millions of dollars annually due to increased efficiency, reduced liability exposure (centralizing meetings contracts), and better buying leverage by more accurately knowing actual meeting spend by vendor from previous years.
- Technology will assist in strategic meetings management to track and communicate return on investment (ROI) metrics to all meeting stakeholders.
- Matchmaking programs, popular in the singles scene, will work their way into the meetings arena to bring people of like interests together at meetings.
- VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) - people will use broadband Internet (wireless and wired) to make phone calls around the world at little or no cost. Calls can then be more easily linked in with data management and customer relationship management systems to better serve client needs. This change will happen for both wired and mobile phones and will impact the way the meeting professionals communicate.
We are living in very exciting times. These technology developments are just a few in the digital revolution that will help meeting professionals work faster, better, and cheaper while improving and helping personalize the interactions between planner, suppliers, and attendees.
Corbin Ball is President of Corbin Ball Associates, a meetings technology consulting practice. Its website is www.corbinball.com. Article reprinted by permission of the author.
ON OUR RADAR
Upcoming Industry Events
PCMA Annual Conference
January 7-10, 2007
Toronto, Ontario Canada
MPI - PEC
January 20-23, 2007
New Orleans, LA
Mark Your Calendar
ConferenceDirect Annual Conference
February 7-8, 2007
Contact your Conference Direct Associate or visit www.conferencedirect.com for more information.
Bedside Table
An occasional column noting readings and recommendations from notable, luminary, and insightful industry leaders.
"I am reading 'Our Endangered Values' by Jimmy Carter. Since I believe at the end of the day, everything comes down to your character, I think it is very important to continually review your basic governing vales and strengthen your character."
Mitchell Perry
CEO, JM Perry Learning Technologies
“I am slowly moving through 'The World is Flat' by Tom Friedman and I just finished '7 Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do That Others Don't' published by ASAE/Center.“
Colin Rorrie
Senior Vice President, ConferenceDirect
