Meeting Nirvana

Picking a great meeting site is like trying to pick a winner in the Miss America beauty pageant: there are lots of beautiful options, but finding the one with great personality, a can-do attitude and all the right features can be a challenge. In fact, when Selling Power went in search of great places to hold sales meetings, we found a lot of incredible properties with mountain vistas and spectacular golf courses, or downtown convenience and elaborate entertainment, but what separated the truly great sites from the merely beautiful properties were the people working at those properties. That’s the message we heard again and again – that the quality of the staff is what transforms a good location into a one-of-a-kind experience that has companies ready to sign up again and again for future meetings. Here’s a look at five of the top sales-meeting sites around the country.

The Bellagio
Las Vegas, NV
When Eric Davidson, area director of sales for Kimberly-Clark Corp., went in search of a hotel with “great sleeping and meeting rooms and a lot of entertainment options in the evenings” for the company’s sales management meeting, he found the choice fairly easy: Las Vegas’s Bellagio. The selection isn’t surprising, considering that the Bellagio has won almost every meeting and hospitality award in the book, and its name has become synonymous with luxury and quality.

Did the site live up to his expectations? Absolutely, says Davidson. “The food was exquisite. The sales and marketing people were really accommodating, both for our meeting needs and making suggestions for shows to see at night,” he says. Attendees were welcomed to the hotel with “beautiful baskets” in their rooms that included bottles of wine, golf shirts and golf balls. “Of all the meetings we’ve held this year, this was by far the nicest property, and the whole experience was top notch. I would definitely go back there.”

Bellagio’s facilities include the 45,000-square-foot Grand Ballroom, 23,000-square-foot Bellagio Ballroom and 14 meeting rooms ranging in size from 1,000 to 10,000 square feet. But these aren’t your everyday meeting rooms, says Chrisann Flatt, Bellagio’s vice president of hotel sales and marketing. All are soundproof and elaborately decorated with crown molding, wall sconces, padded panels and chandeliers. Each meeting room also is equipped with speaker phones, data ports and high-speed Internet connections. For companies with more extensive equipment requirements, a full staff of audiovisual technicians is on site to handle any A/V needs, says Flatt. Staff is on hand to deliver faxes, send mail and assist with word processing, if needed.

For after-meeting recreation, the sky’s the limit – after all, this is Las Vegas. On-site at the Bellagio, guests have access to gaming, an art gallery, shopping, a botanical garden, a show and a view of the hotel’s famous water show. Off-site there are myriad other show and entertainment options.

“The Bellagio lives up to all expectations. You expect it to be first class and it is,” says Jeanne Thompson, vice president of Conference and Travel Services in Ft. Wayne, IN. Thompson coordinated a sales meeting at the Bellagio for a major financial services company last year. The meeting, attended by about 1,500 people, was partly an incentive trip, since salespeople had to achieve a certain level of sales to attend. So Thompson needed a location that would motivate people to sell.

The Bellagio name worked so well that the group’s numbers grew unexpectedly at the last minute. Sill, it was no problem for the hotel’s meeting coordinators. “On the opening night, our people had to be based partly inside and partly outside the ballroom I’d reserved for the reception, but the efforts of the hotel were amazing,” she says. “They made sure that everything flowed and everyone connected, and no one felt like it was an overflow situation.”

If your group is small (fewer than 200 rooms) and your dates are flexible, Flatt says, you can book within six months of the meeting date. For larger groups, or to have the best chance at securing preferred dates and rooms, plan on making reservations about a year in advance. Room and meal prices vary with many factors, but in the off-peak season, you’ll pay between $159 and $229 for a room midweek and between $209 and $399 on weekends. Banquet meals generally run between $17.50 and $46 per person for breakfast or brunch, between $34 and $45 per person for lunch, and between $62 and $175 for dinner.

Vail Cascade Resort & Spa
Vail, CO
Located at the base of Vail Mountain, Vail Cascade Resort & Spa offered Colorado Springs-based Front Range Solutions the ideal combination of remoteness and activity for the CRM software manufacturer’s annual sales meeting last summer. The meeting was a nine-day event for about 200 salespeople and 400 channel partners, and attendees later said it was the best in the event’s seven-year history, according to Ami Eishtadt-Heath, Front Range Solutions’ worldwide event director. “I was getting rave reviews from everyone who attended,” she says. “Vail Cascade’s service was outstanding; their staff was outstanding; their food was outstanding. They did such a good job that I was completely blown away.”

The meeting’s overwhelming success should have come as no surprise. Vail Cascade has received much recognition for its facilities and meeting services, including awards from Meetings & Conventions magazine, Corporate & Incentive Travel, Condé Nast Traveler and Fodor’s. And no wonder – not only are the meeting facilities state-of-the-art, but groups have access to an endless list of such recreational activities as golf, skiing, dog sledding, snowmobiling, hot air ballooning, horseback riding, hiking and rafting. And to soothe sore muscles and tired brains, Vail Cascade just added a 10,000-square-foot spa, which offers everything from body wraps to massages to manicures. With so much to choose from, roughly 75 percent of the groups visiting Vail Cascade schedule outdoor activities to complement their business agenda, says Jennifer Bill, resort marketing manager.

Indoors, the resort offers 58,000 square feet of conference space divided among 18 meeting rooms ranging in size from 200 to 5,800 square feet. A business center offers access to computers, high-speed Internet connections, word processors, fax machines, photo copiers and shipping services.

The conference services staff handles all the logistics, from arranging transportation from Denver International Airport or Vail/Eagle Regional Airport to coordinating meeting space and activities, helping with dining needs and making sure everything runs smoothly during each event. Eishstadt-Heath praises the flexibility of the staff in handling last-minute changes and requests. When her CEO announced in front of 600 people that he’d have “Ami get us a room for tomorrow so we can all come back together and meet one more time,” she knew she was in trouble – the entire resort was already booked. However, in fewer than 12 hours, the resort staff managed to clear a ballroom for the company, even though it gave the staff only half an hour on each end of Front Range’s impromptu meeting to tear down and set up for a meal service.

“Their team made me look like a star pulling off an event of that magnitude so flawlessly,” says Eishstadt-Heath, noting that her company is now considering using Vail Cascade every other year, altering it with a conference center in a major city.

For the best chance at getting your choice of dates and activities, Bill recommends scheduling your event at least six months in advance. In peak summer months, plan on paying about $250 per guest per night, which means a group of 50 people staying three days would cost about $54,000 for lodging, three meals a day and use of the meeting facilities. That price does not include taxes, gratuities or audiovisual services through the resort’s in-house A/V team. An optional “resort fee,” 4 percent of the room rate, gives visitors access to special services such as free incoming faxes, local calls, access to the athletic club and self-parking.

MGM Grand Hotel and Casino
Las Vegas, NV
There’s nothing like a crisis to bring out the true colors of a conference site and its staff. That’s what Carlson Marketing Group, a marketing services agency headquartered in Minneapolis, discovered during a sales-training and product reintroduction meeting for 3,500 employees of a major pharmaceutical company. About 500 of those attendees arrived at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in early September last year; the remainder were due in on September 11. However, when terrorists hijacked four aircraft and ground to a halt the nation’s air transportation network that day, the meeting was canceled and the on-site group’s needs instantly changed.

Bob Cocco, relationship manager with Carlson, helped coordinate the event and says he got two early morning calls on the 11th. The first was from a co-worker telling him to turn on his television. The second was from his conference planner at MGM. Whatever he needed to get his 500 meeting attendees home safely, the staff member told him, the hotel would handle. “In such a time of crisis,” says Kris Hanouseck, account manager at Carlson, “their team was totally focused on our comfort.”

While the nation mourned, MGM Grand’s meeting staff worked in high gear to accommodate its stranded guests. They made available grief counselors and chaplains. They piped in CNN to the giant screens in the pharmaceutical company’s rented meeting room. When air travel restrictions persisted, the hotel arranged buses to drive attendees back to their home cities and allowed them to take pillows and blankets with them at no charge. And when the final bill arrived later, Cocco says he was astounded to see the hotel had not charged them for anything beyond what had been used. “They had food ordered for 3,500 people that day, and I know it must have been in the kitchen, but they only charged us for the food consumed by the 500 people who were there,” he says.

Carlson has worked with MGM Grand in the past, and Cocco says the attentiveness and responsiveness of the staff during the events of September 11 were no different than the courtesy and respect that has marked every contact with the hotel. Add to that attentiveness 315,000 net square feet of meeting space and countless entertainment options on the 114-acre property, and it’s no wonder companies keep coming back: as of October 2001, 70 percent of the groups booked for 2002 were repeat customers, says Richard Harper, MGM Grand’s vice president of sales.

In 1998, the hotel opened the MGM Grand Conference Center, featuring three levels of meeting and convention space, all with high-speed Internet access. For other equipment needs, an in-house audiovisual company, MGM Grand Productions, can handle anything from a flip chart to a multimillion-dollar production. Entertainment options include The Park, with theaters, themed streets, and rides that companies can rent out in full or in part; Studio54, which Harper calls “the hottest nightclub in Vegas;” the 1,700-seat EFX Theatre, at which Rick Springfield performs; the Grand Spa; the lion habitat; five pools; the casino, which Harper says can offer private gaming instruction or dedicate certain areas to a company; and the 17,000-seat Grand Garden Arena.

Intimidated by the size? Don’t be. Harper says nearly 70 percent of the groups handled by MGM Grand have 150 or fewer people. A division called Grand Meetings, which handles coordination for these smaller events, “can take a 15-person meeting and make them feel like they own the resort,” says Harper.

Costs vary considerably based on group size, length of stay, type of entertainment, audio visual requirements, etc., but Harper says a group of 50 coming midweek and staying three days might pay around $22,726 for rooms, $20,000 for food and beverage, and an average of $5,000 for audiovisual needs and $7,500 for entertainment. Seventy-five percent of MGM Grand’s business books within 12 months of their event, says Harper, although the size of the facility almost always enables them to handle last-minute requests.

Resort at Squaw Creek
Lake Tahoe, CA
After a site visit to the Resort at Squaw Creek in Lake Tahoe last year, Amy Drago, meeting planner for the Independent Sealing Distributors in Annapolis, MD, wrote a thank-you note to one of the resort’s meeting coordinators, who in turn wrote back promising, “We won’t let you down.” “That was the understatement of the year,” says Drago, who says the resort staff “performed beautifully” and notes she was approached one night by three separate attendees with compliments about one of the banquet servers.

The Resort at Squaw Creek offers 26 meeting rooms ranging in size from 810 square feet to the 9,525 square-foot Grand Ballroom, which can hold more than 700 people in a classroom setting and features large windows overlooking Squaw Valley. Each meeting room has built-in screens and white boards, multiple phone lines and direct intercom access to the Business Center. Each room also has its own thermostat, lighting and sound controls. The Audio Visual Center and Business Center, which provide A/V equipment and administrative support, respectively, are owned and operated by the resort, not an outside contractor.

These details can make all the difference. “The flow of meeting space is intelligently laid out, the ergonomic chairs make long, boring meetings much more comfortable, and the built-in A/V gives harried meeting planners a few less details to fret over,” says Drago, who calls the Resort at Squaw Creek a “jewel of the Sierra Nevada.”

While the resort is a popular leisure destination as well as a top meeting location – roughly 45 percent of the property’s business is leisure and 55 percent is business-related groups – the facility was designed to keep the two segments from bumping into each other, says Jason Johnson, the resort’s director of sales. All meeting space is at one end of the property, which means leisure guests could go their entire visit without ever seeing meeting attendees, and business groups don’t have to worry about someone in their bathing suit wandering through the coffee break area.

If your sales team likes the outdoors, their recreation options are endless – among the choices are an 18-hole Robert Trent Jones Jr. golf course, equestrian center, hiking and biking trails, whitewater rafting and skiing. Johnson says there’s also a destination management company on site that can handle group outings ranging from a reception and dinner at 9,000 feet at the top of Squaw Valley to a sunset paddleboat trip on Lake Tahoe. For those who’d rather stay inside, the Resort at Squaw Creek recently invested $5 million to renovate it’s spa, which now covers 12,000 square feet with more than 10 treatment rooms and a full-service beauty salon and lounge.

Over the past 18 months, Johnson says he has seen the booking window shrink, and the resort now sees groups booking events as little as 60 days out, although most groups typically give themselves a bigger window to ensure their choice of dates and activities. Costs vary, mostly depending on the season. In the summer and winter peak seasons, a complete meeting package (CMP) program typically would run between $345 and $395 per person per day based on single occupancy. That amount includes the guest room, meeting rooms, dinner on arrival night, three meals a day during the stay, breakfast and lunch on the departure day and basic audiovisual support. During nonpeak seasons, those rates fall to between $265 and $295.

Cheyenne Mountain Resort
Colorado Springs, CO
Last year, Robert Hynick, Stihl Incorporated’s manager of customer services, was charged with finding a great location for the company’s biannual sales meeting. The site had to be outside Virginia Beach, Stihl’s home base, where the meetings are usually held, and it had to offer state-of-the-art meeting facilities and plenty of recreational options for the 50 attendees. Hynick looked around and made what he said was an easy decision. He picked Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs, CO.

“From top to bottom it’s a first class place,” says Hynick, noting that the resort is now at the top of his list for a return engagement. “Anyone considering an event should go there.”

Cheyenne Mountain Resort features 40,000 square feet of meeting space divided into 38 conference rooms ranging in size from 700 square feet to 6,400 square feet. Typical meeting size is between 20 and 500 attendees, all of whom will sit on Shelby Williams Eight-Hour chairs, top-of-the-line, ergonomically correct seats with lumbar support, says Scott Spurlock, the resort’s assistant general manager. Each attendee can access the Internet through the point-to-point T-1 lines available in each conference room. “We also have our own Class C license, which allows us to supply public IP addresses to clients,” says Dan Zwach, Cheyenne’s director of information technology. “This means guests can go straight out to the Internet without having to go through a firewall or proxy server, which eliminates a lot of problems with such things as Web conferencing.”

The resort also offers wireless Internet access in its lobby and by this spring expects the technology to be available in all guest rooms. Also, by next month, the resort plans to offer in-house Web-casting services, which means remote users viewing a meeting via Web cast will be able to connect to a server on Cheyenne Mountain’s property, eliminating the need for an outside vendor, Zwach says.

A/V and office services are available in the newly upgraded Media and Business Service centers. Need 100 bound copies of your presentation at the last minute? No problem, says Spurlock. The Business Service Center offers Mac and PC computing, color copies, table tent cards, binders, name badges – in short, “Everything you think of that Kinko’s can do, we can do,” Spurlock says.

While the facilities met Hynick’s every expectation, it was the staff that most impressed him. “There are lots of beautiful places with lousy staff, but these were people who weren’t just interested in getting my business for one meeting. They really invested time and effort in keeping me up to date and understanding my needs,” he says. “They were hands-on and obviously care about their customers. I didn’t have to reintroduce myself every day.”

Most importantly, he said, he saw real longevity in the staff, and everyone seemed to enjoy working at Cheyenne Mountain Resort. “They seem to like their work, like each other and help each other out a lot,” he says.

For choice dates, Spurlock suggests booking your event at least 90 days in advance. He estimates the cost of 50 people staying three days and two nights at $40,000 during the summer’s high season. That fee, he says, includes guest rooms, meeting space, three meals a day, coffee breaks and access to the fitness center. Audiovisual support or access to the resort’s many outdoor recreational activities would be extra.

Editor’s note:
If you’ve been to a meeting at a great meeting site, let us know. Write to Great Meetings, Selling Power, PO Box 5467, Fredericksburg, VA 22403, or email editor@sellingpower.com.