"The room gap is happening and it's getting worse. We've got to blow up our current practices," said Christine Shimasaki, CMP, executive vice president of sales and marketing, San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau. She spoke at a packed session...
Annette Meyer, meetings and events manager, American Rental Association, Moline, Ill., was delighted to hear she'd won a vacation package for two just for filling out the 2002 Inner Circle Award ballot she found in the pages of Association...
A new kind of contract is shooting holes in the way business is being done between meeting planners and hotels. “Bulletproof contracts,” tightly written, highly definitive contracts, are heavily weighted toward hotels and are growing increasingly...
Midsize (or second-tier) cities and their CVBs offer religious meeting planners a new array of convention center facilities and lots of negotiability in these recessionary times. Religious conventions that appreciate a little extra attention can...
One week after September 11, 2001, I was sitting in a lobby at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. My dad was undergoing what turned out to be successful liver cancer surgery, but the day was a long one. It began at 5 a.m., when my wife and I...
One of the things we take for granted in our high-tech world is batteries. As we become more and more “wireless,” our dependence upon batteries increases, because so much of our personal and office equipment runs on battery power: PDAs, cell...
Two years ago in this issue our cover story was “Call to Action: ASAE CEO Mike Olson Challenges Associations to Face the Threat of the Net.” The article was in part a rebuttal to an Industry Standard article that called associations “the next...
Edward J. Tromczyski, president and chief operating officer of PlanSoft, believes that you owe it to your career and your organization to invest a few minutes each day at his company's Web-based meeting planning site, www.mpoint.com. If you're...
The NAA is in the midst of a strategic planning process that has its Manchester, N.H.-based staff exploring sweeping changes, including the launch of new meetings targeting specific member niches. The 64-year-old association already has a...