Preparing for Recovery: Meeting and Event Planners Share Expectations and Insights for Facilities and Future Events

Three industry planners shared their expectations, trends, and insights in a Fox Cities CVB-sponsored panel discussion.

Health and safety matters.
Event attendees want to feel safe at events. Event organizers and sponsoring organizations want to avoid liability and/or potential COVID19, or other health, outbreaks being tied to their event. Consider, is your facility following best practices to best ensure health and safety at events, and how are precautions and guidelines being communicated? What guidelines are your facility following and asking attendees or the organization to follow while onsite?

Contracts will become more inclusive.
Contracts are being revised, and future ones written, with more inclusive cancellation language and expectations. Natural disasters, disease, terrorism, hotel/convention inability to provide services, force majeure, and other verbiage is being included. Planners are also expecting less lead time (given to the facility) written into contract termination clauses, such as cancellation up to 10 days before an event. This accommodates for potential situations like COVID19 that drastically and rapidly changed the meeting, event, and travel landscape.

Room arrangements will shift.
To allow for physical distancing, room arrangements will change for the foreseeable future. Greater space between tables, fewer seats at a table, more space between vendor booths, and more area for break and gathering areas will be among the expectations. Hotel and event venues should update room capacity charts and other resources to account for the changes. An event that may have previously only taken up one or two sections of a ballroom, may now require the entire ballroom. Instead of hosting multiple events simultaneously, will the venue only be able to accommodate one event (or fewer) at a time? How does that affect the facility's bottom line?

Due to event and meeting uncertainty, planners noted future room block numbers and event attendee counts will be conservative.

Say goodbye to the buffet.
The run of the popular buffet-style meals at conferences and events may be coming to an end. Planners indicated they, nor their members or organizations, are comfortable with serving buffets at this point. While economically-friendly and cost effective, buffets and self service are viewed as less sanitary than other plating and serving options. Plated meals, boxed dinners, and cafeteria-style serving will grow in popularity.

Breaks at conferences and events often consisted of self-serve snack bars or coffee stations. Self-service coffee may be replaced with coffee bars with baristas. Build-your-own-snack bars may be replaced with prepackaged items. Accounting for these changes and additional staffing, prepackaging, and disposal items will need to be considered. Does that cost rest with the venue or with the organization?

Planners want creative ideas and innovative solutions for meals, boxed lunches, drink breaks, and to-go snacks. Think outside the box about your boxed meals. Planners are hungry for your ideas and creativity in food and beverage.

Communication remains key.
Relationships and communication remain critical in the meetings, events, and sales industry. Work closely with planners to reschedule events that had to be canceled or indefinitely postponed. If possible, many planners would be interested in rescheduling to the same site – your venue. Still "early" in the evolving COVID19 situation, planners are creating back-up plans for virtual events for those in fall/winter 2020 and into 2021 that have not yet been canceled. Manage the process and relationship as the mutually beneficial partnership it hopefully is or can be.

For Fox Cities meeting and event planning resources, click here, or contact Amy Rivera or Alison Hutchinson, Fox Cities CVB group sales managers.

Panelists
Lindsay Barber, CMP
Director of Meetings, Marketing, and Special Projects
National Agricultural Aviation Association

Bob Kaiser
Meeting Planner
Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA)

Patrick Laws
President
Wisconsin Association of Mutual Insurance Companies