Archive for category: Tips, Tricks and Trends

Finding work-life balance. Ask anyone what strong desire they have in their professional life and this is often a popular answer. We all want the blooming career at the same time we want a loving, close-knit family at the same time we want a generous network of friends to spend happy hours and weekends with. As meeting and event professionals, our job descriptions almost always state “must be available nights and weekends“. Is it just me, or is anyone else asking when we do we get to rest? To have a game night with our family? To clean our homes? Or even to workout? I found the solution: make time for it all. But how? I have a few ideas for you.

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Each month, we like to recognize and highlight an internal employee on our blog. PEC wants you to know the names and faces behind our walls, since these are the people that work daily for the betterment of our services for our clients. In today’s PEC Employee Spotlight you’ll meet Kaitlyn.

Name: Kaitlyn Herbst
Position: Event Coordinator

What point in the event planning process is your favorite?
I like the creative proposal stage. It’s fun to research and pull together ideas to present to clients. Anytime we get to brainstorm colors and themes is a fun day.

What is your favorite hobby outside of work?
I enjoy refurbishing wood furniture and making any crafty wall decor. Stripping paint is my least favorite part of a project, but once I get to sanding and painting or staining I really start to have fun. There is satisfaction in taking something old and creating something unique to my taste that I can use.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? (Given that your family or friends would be there too).
I’m pretty fond of home (here) and I’m really looking forward to my first summer in Milwaukee. I don’t think I would ever leave for long, but an extended stay in Ireland or New Zealand would be a dream.

What cooking or baking dish are you known for?
Chocolate sour cream cookies (now Greek Yogurt Cookies) with Andes mint chips. They taste like meltaways and are delicious! They are probably one of the things in life that I don’t stay humble about. It’s my Grandma’s recipe, which you can never beat.  The secret ingredient (according to her)… 1 cup of love!

If you weren’t working in events, what would you be doing?
I would be working in a health/fitness related field. I would probably take my coordinating skills and apply them to creating nutrition and fitness plans for clients.

Name one interesting fact about yourself!
I can be indecisive…I attended 3 colleges in 4.5 years to obtain 1 degree. Or I have a traveling scarf with me two best friends who have lived in different parts of the world at given times. It has been to more countries than me, but it has mainly resided in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Seattle, WA and Miskolc, Hungary. It currently resides in the Chicago area.

Not considering hosting a meeting in the Midwest? Read this first.

Having been raised in Wisconsin, I was often asked, “Where do you want to live when you grow up?” My mind never wandered to distant places. My desires were not to have warm sand beneath my feet all year long or to experience the big city lights to the east. My real unanswered question was – could I ever leave? At this stage of my life, nearing my mid-twenties, the answer is yes, I could.  However, would I really want to? I have always been a Wisconsinite. I have traveled throughout the United States and to Eastern Europe, but my heart always remains in the Midwest.

I recently moved to Milwaukee – the biggest city I have lived in. This city has a way of connecting with my heart. The connection one experiences when listening to music, I feel walking the streets of downtown. With the big city lights overhead, I still feel my small town roots. As a young adult, moving here was easy. The people, young and old, are friendly, motivated and driven.  There are more cultures than I have experienced in a lifetime and weekend upon weekend there are festivals to celebrate those specific cultures. The atmosphere is one that I would describe as eclectic. There is always a new restaurant or pub to check off the list, or for the knowledge hungry, ever changing museum exhibits.

Other big cities in the Midwest such as Chicago, Indianapolis and Minneapolis provide much of the same. Opportunities in these cities to experience art and culture are endless. For a meeting planner, it is like being a kid in a candy store. Not only are the cities unique and entirely affordable, but the event venues offer a solid reason to visit. Long gone are the days where every reception is held in a ballroom. Here in the Midwest, venues provide diversity. Museums, warehouses, stadiums, theaters, union stations and other unique venues have become common sites to host events.

As a leading event planning agency in the Midwest, PEC encourages our clients to think outside the box and to give their guests an unforgettable experience. We have planned extraordinary conferences and galas for clients at venues such as the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Target Field in Minneapolis, and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

If you have an upcoming event, the region I call home has everything to offer!

This post was written by Kaitlyn Herbst, Event Coordinator at PEC.

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Your convention is months away and you have established a hotel room block, but how do you keep attendees from reserving a room outside your room block? This is a primary concern of many meeting planners, as the need to fill room blocks is vital to the overall success of the convention or meeting.

“What’s in it for me?” That is what the attendee is asking when they see hotel information on their registration site. Your attendee’s need to reserve a hotel room for your event, but how do you convince them to reserve a room within your room block?

As the meeting planner, you must ensure that you are creating  a hotel contract with minimal risk for your event by starting with a reasonable room block and the necessary clauses to protect your company. Not reaching your room block means owing the hotel attrition, which has the potential to add up to thousands of dollars if you are not careful.

Here are some tricks to provide incentive for your attendees to reserve a room within your room block:

• Negotiate the lowest rate possible and hold the hotel to not publishing a lower rate over your event dates.
• Offer a discount on registration for the attendee’s that book at the hotel.  It could be a discount on the hotel itself or one of the sessions or socials.
• Offer a “VIP” reception at the hotel on the first day of the event for just those booked through the block.
• Attendees may want to see a cash value or some sort of discount associated with the hotel.  Try working with the hotel to offer something complimentary like breakfast, drink vouchers or free Wi-Fi.
• Get your local CVB involved. Most CVB’s can put together a welcome packet full of discounts at local attractions or restaurants that can be put in your hotel welcome packet.
• Enter attendees into a raffle for a cash prize if they book within the block.
• You can work with your registration system as well. Determine if they have the capability to disable registration for the event unless they see your reservation at the hotel first.
• Increase registration by a certain dollar amount if they book their sleeping rooms outside the room block.

Given all of these incentives, your attendees may still book outside your room block for various reasons. In this case, place a clause into your hotel contract that allows you to audit your attendees. The hotel will use your attendee list from the event and compare it to those attendees that booked at the hotel over your event dates. You can pick up those few attendees that did not register through your block but still stayed at the hotel.

Reviewing and negotiating a hotel contract can be time-consuming, confusing, and down-right frustrating. You are seeking a fair agreement that accurately and comprehensively covers your meeting arrangements, keeps financial risk to a minimum, and protects your company assets. Often times the contract you receive from the hotel may be one-sided in favor of the hotel, vague in many places, missing essential language, and difficult to interpret.

Hotel contracts have gotten increasingly longer and more complex in recent years.  One reason is because hotels are trying to protect themselves from previous mistakes that have cost them money. Secondly, they are seeking good fortune reigns. Convention hotels have experienced increased occupancy, profits, and annual rates. Due to this fact, performance-related clauses are now the rule rather than the exception.

As a meeting planner, you are entitled to agree to a hotel contract that is written in the best interest of your organization that not only gets you what you want at the right price, but is also clear, easy to read, written in laymen’s terms, and is unambiguous.  Did you ever consider the fact that it’s time for the hotel to sign your contract?

Rule number one in your contract: everything must be in writing.  A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.  When parties fail to live up to an agreement, written proof of the negotiator’s intent is critical.  It eliminates the “he said, she said” confusion.  What if the original hotel general manager or kind sales executive you negotiated with is no longer employed at the hotel? A written contract ensures that everything agreed upon is in writing to avoid points of contention upon the arrival of your meeting.

What are your obligations for room nights?  Room block, rate, and reservation method are quite standard in a contract, but have you provided a clause that allows for a room block adjustment without penalty and one that flows down to attrition/cancellation penalties? The hotel might have offered the lowest room rate possible, but given this detail, does your provision include rates that are published and may be booked on the internet?  If a lower rate is discovered, does your clause include a must-match for the entire group?

Avoid hotel form contracts.  Hotels can take a brilliant negotiation and reshape it into something ugly that is not in your organization’s best interest. Your hotel contract will be strait forward and 100 percent reflective of the negotiation in addition to being completely understandable.

PEC specializes in Site Selection and Hotel Contract Negotiating. Not only does PEC have a hotel contract that can be presented to the hotel on the client’s behalf, but we have an arsenal of clauses that can be included in a hotel contract that benefits both the client and the hotel. PEC will work to find hotel contract clauses that best apply to the needs of the client and event.