Non-Office Space

I spent most of today in a meeting in one of the hotels near LAX – I won’t specify which one, partly because I’m not that into being sued, and mostly because I’ve been in a lot of hotel conference facilities in my time, and there isn’t a lot to choose between them in the first place. More to the point, perhaps, I’ve rented such facilities before, when we were setting up training programs during my days with the consulting firm, and they don’t vary all that much. One specifies the number of people expected, the audio/visual equipment needed, refreshments and/or meals required, and the number of days, and the hotel’s Conferences and Events manager runs the numbers together and tells you how much it’s all going to cost.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, as so often happens, there are intangibles that can change everything. Today’s event, for example, was held at a hotel that uses its huge open-air parking lot as an Airport parking lot (since the airport is on the other side of the highway). So you pull up to this ornate façade, are greeted by the uniformed doormen, ask for the self-parking area, and are directed to… Well, frankly, to one of the largest open plains I have ever seen, completely covered with cars. It’s hot, it’s constantly bathed in jet exhaust, there are no spaces anywhere near the hotel itself, and while there’s a parking lot shuttle, it goes to the airport, not to the hotel.

Of course, a real VIP would just use the valet parking up front, and put it all on the expense account, but in many ways this can make matters even worse; you’re telling all of the lower-ranking people attending your meeting that you don’t care if they have to walk half a mile under constantly landing airplanes on a hot day, so long as the important people are taken care of. One hotel I worked at in Phoenix didn’t even have parking for their conference center; you could try to get one of the regular guest spaces (if there was an empty room somewhere in the hotel), or park elsewhere and take a cab.

Then there’s food. If you’re planning to serve food during the conference anyway, you can usually get it as part of the package. The problem is that a lot of conference facilities use the room to draw in business for their catering operation, and not only charge a lot for the meals but jack up the room rate if you DON’T purchase food for your participants. This can be a real problem if the food is overpriced, inferior in quality, or just not what your participants would want to eat in the first place. This got so bad in one place in the Midwest that we wound up going with the competition across the street, just because we didn’t want to pay that much for Swedish meatballs that could gag a goat.

Then there’s furnishings, heating and cool, signage, restrooms, and a dozen other items that don’t appear on the rate sheet, but can change the entire atmosphere of your conference. If the stacking chairs are too uncomfortable, if the air conditioning is out of order (or up so high that you could hang meat in the conference room), if the restrooms are on the other side of the building or locked, if the projector doesn’t work or you can’t get Internet access as promised, or if the meeting room has the wrong sign on the door and no one can figure out where your meeting is (two of these things happened today, in fact), it won’t matter how good the rate you got on the room happened to be; the conference is still going to be a bust.

And this doesn’t even consider the inherent problem of having your participants try to stay awake during the actual sessions…