The Conference Center Solution

When Andy Dolce comes to work in the morning, he knows the problem that is waiting for him – and it concerns you. The CEO of Dolce International, a sprawling collection of conference centers in the U.S., Canada and Europe, Dolce firmly believes he can sell you on having your next meeting in one of his facilities. But he also knows he has one hurdle to jump. “If only I can get people to come out and look at our facilities,” sighs Dolce. “When they do, they are sold. The properties sell themselves.”

“Conference centers still are very misunderstood,” adds Mike Fahner, vice president of sales and marketing for ARAMARK Harrison Lodging, another large collection of conference facilities. “Once people get what we are doing, they become great fans.”

Think conference center, and what comes to mind? For many of us, the answer is a big blank. The phrase “conference center” conjures up nothing at all. For others – ones with dustier, older memories – the phrase may even be a turn-off. “A problem everybody in this industry has is our legacy,” says Burt Cabanas, CEO of Benchmark Hospitality, another collection of conference centers. Cabana is referring to the industry’s history and its start, a half-century ago, as meeting rooms typically situated on college campuses and where attendees (often new hires and very junior execs) sat through long, frequently grueling lectures about their employer and the business marketplace. Were the sessions informative? Often. But these stays almost never were fun or exciting, and when executives have these memories, few are in a rush to book a 21st century meeting into a conference center.

Except, “The industry has changed – a lot,” says Cabanas. “We now have facilities that rival top resorts.” He’s definitely right, because first-class golf has become a staple at many conference facilities. So have top-quality spas. One even features what may be the world’s most challenging surfing (for that, go to Benchmark’s Turtle Bay on Oahu’s north shore). Certainly, some conference centers remain fairly bare-bones, but a strong industry trend is to flesh out conference centers with ever-more-alluring recreational activities to keep meeting attendees excited – not just when they are meeting, but also when they eat, play and socialize. Rooms, too, have gotten spiffier. Dormitory-style functionality is a thing of the past, and most conference centers now offer rooms that rival those found in hotels.

Beyond that, however, “we are in business for meetings. We know what executives want from a meeting, and we know how to deal with it. Hotels do many other things,” says Dolce. And while hotels are akin to Swiss Army Knives – they are the hospitality sector’s answer for wedding receptions, retirement parties, high school proms, vacation travelers, and, yes, business meetings too – conference centers define themselves as primarily in existence to host meetings. (A requirement for membership in the International Association of Conference Centers, IACC, is that 60 percent of a facility’s business come from meetings – see sidebar “IACC Gets Muscular”). “This is what we do, and we do it well,” says Cabanas, who points out that top-quality A/V and computer gear, ergonomic chairs, and ample meeting spaces are conference center staples. This is how they distinguish themselves from competitors, and conference center operators are confident that their focus on the ingredients that make meetings work is what makes their offers compelling to meeting experts who have toured their properties.

“Conference centers are meeting specialists. Hotels aren’t,” says Debra Lein, vice president, operations with Sodexho Conferencing, the globe’s biggest operator of conference centers, with more than 100 facilities worldwide. “If you are gathering to have a meeting – when that is the purpose of getting together – conference centers are where you need to be, because that is our main focus.”

Skeptical that conference centers are in fact a dream solution for your next meeting venue? Stay tuned for a close-up look at a range of properties – running the gamut from relatively simple (but highly functional) to luxe – but, first, tune in for a few earsful from professional meeting planners who are ready to point out the good, the bad, and maybe even the ugly about conference centers.

Meeting Planners Pipe Up

Survey meeting planners, and other than quibbles about conference center pricing (see “A Little Hitch,” below), they generally speak positive volumes about the facilities. Case in point: Hellen Davis, president of Indaba, a meeting-planning company that has worked with Raytheon, Hewlett-Packard and a range of prestige companies. “Conference centers really look after you. They know what executives want; they have prethought all those needs,” says Davis. She adds, “They always have two or three of everything.” When a slide projector breaks at a conference center, usually a replacement is on hand within minutes. “I don’t have to worry about a thing when I book into a conference center. I know I won’t get egg on my face,” says Davis. But amidst her praises she does introduce one worry: “It’s hard to generate excitement about a conference center event.” Just tell a group it’s meeting at La Quinta or Enchantment Resort, and there’s epidemic enthusiasm about the location and the property. That won’t be true with most conference centers, says Davis, who points out that meeting planners have to take this into account and work diligently to stoke enthusiasm. Another problem pointed out by Davis: “Most conference centers aren’t fun at night. They don’t usually offer much entertainment.” Crave slot machines, magic acts, or maybe professional theater? Conference centers – often tucked away in suburban or even rural locations – frequently lag when it comes to night-time glitz. But a solution, says Davis, is for the meeting organizer to plan for this. Create your own night-time activities – schedule theme dinners, bring in entertainment, book a name speaker. Those are sure ways to keep the troops engaged at night.

Meeting planner Shay Williams of Kiva Consulting echoes the positives: “When an event is primarily educational in focus, a conference center usually will be the best location. The staff frequently is highly trained in the needs of businesspeople. They make holding an educational meeting easy.”

Keep talking with planners, and the concensus is that, whenever a meeting genuinely is centered on imparting new information to attendees, conference centers ought to figure high on any ranking of possible venues. “They really do exist to serve this need,” says Williams.

A Little Hitch

Understand this: most conference centers price their offerings in terms of “CMP” or “complete meeting package.” Ask meeting planners, and many will express satisfaction with the fairness of CMP pricing. The price tag includes soup to nuts; it covers everything involved in the meeting from a sleeping room to A/V equipment and refreshment breaks custom-tailored to your organization. (“We can even provide Vegan-friendly offerings,” says Sodexho’s Lein.) But the same planners acknowledge that persuading their customers that CMP is a good value can be a tough sell. “This is a continuing obstacle,” says Williams. “Sometimes it’s hard for clients who have never experienced a conference center to conceptualize what they are getting for their CMP, and the planner has to work to explain this.”

Take note: When outside consultants have compared prices at CMP-based conferences with those of facilities that price everything a la carte (as do many hotels), when services are essentially equal, so is pricing. But when a customer sees that a conference center price looks to be $50 to $100 higher per day per participant, that’s when it takes a persuasive and informed meeting planner to explain why CMP isn’t a rip-off. Many conference centers insist that the bulk of their business, month in, month out, is repeat business – and, certainly, these blue-chip customers are returning only because they believe they have found good value for their money.

Why don’t conference centers “unbundle” CMP pricing? For starters, many have done just that, especially in the past few years when meetings business has been slender. This hasn’t been advertised, but planners say the practice has become common. If a group wants to cross off dinner one night because it plans an off-site outing, few conference centers would refuse to lower the CMP to accommodate that wish. Ask for discounts and, probably, you’ll get them.

But the other side of this coin, say veteran industry insiders, is that the CMP exists precisely because it’s a price that ensures that guests get exactly the meeting they want. Meetings are complicated affairs – everything from chair quality to good coffee at breaks figures into how successful a meeting is. To succeed, many elements have to be deployed to deliver the quality a group wants. And CMP is the industry’s solution because it’s a price that takes into account the many variables. Are there meetings with cheaper prices? Absolutely – but will they deliver the same results? Conference center insiders are confident that their prices stand up to the competition.

A final word on costs: savvy customers say that oftentimes the final accounting actually shows that conference centers deliver significant savings. “Many of our clients like conference centers precisely because they gain significant financial control over the costs of an event,” says Terry Rieser, a partner with event organizer TAG Creative. Book into a hotel and oftentimes that means participants are popping into bars, restaurants and spas and racking up charges on company credit cards. Conference centers usually offer many fewer places for attendees to accumulate a la carte charges and, in today’s fiscally prudent environment, that can become a big plus for many organizations.

Property Tour

The exciting – sometimes even perplexing – fact about conference centers today is the dramatic differences among them. And that’s why a solid starting point is simply to consider what is out there, from the Rocky Mountains to New Jersey, Texas, and more. Case in point:

Keystone Conference Center

Want proof that today’s conference centers are truly different? Head to the Keystone Resort and Conference Center in Keystone, CO, about 70 miles west of Denver. The largest meeting facility in the Colorado Rockies, Keystone boasts 100,000 square feet of meetings space that’s flexible enough to accommodate groups as small as 10 or groups of many hundreds. Meeting facilities are appropriately slick, but Keystone also offers acres of skiing as well as easy access to nearby Vail and Beaver Creek. This is about as stunning as meeting locations get, and the snow in the winter months creates long-lasting memories. Remember, too, that ski mountains make for delightful, cool summer destinations too – and Keystone definitely serves a year-round market.

Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center

Don’t think the big hotel chains haven’t sniffed out the potential profits to be made in providing high-level meeting facilities. More of the name-brand players are muscling into this niche, and Exhibit A that hotel companies indeed can do meetings right is the Hilton’s DFW facility (located just five minutes from the airport). A stay here defies all the cliches about how hotels mismanage meetings. This facility has all the right stuff required for membership in IACC – that means ergonomic chairs, onsite A/V staff, state of the art computer and A/V equipment. But there’s also fishing in a private lake, easy access to the Texas Rangers baseball stadium, and high-quality sleeping rooms and dining. This is a facility that promises everything on site was developed with meetings in mind.

Rosemont Conference Center

Just 20 miles from Chicago and only five minutes from O’Hare Airport, Rosemont Conference Center is in a different world. It’s just two square miles, and 4,224 residents call Rosemont home, but this is a town for whom business meetings are serious business indeed. Offering convenient access to anybody in the Midwest, Rosemont is a busy meetings hub, and its intention is to get busier still. That’s because the town is buffing up its conference center with a major addition and the facility soon will sport 92,000 square feet of meeting space with 50 meeting rooms and three ballrooms. A goal of the facility: to incorporate state of the art meeting technologies. Unlike most new-style conference centers, however, Rosemont does not feature attached sleeping rooms. However, literally a dozen nearby hotels (from Sofitel to Best Western, and ranging in size from a 1,100-room Hyatt to much cozier venues) ensure that meeting participants won’t go sleepless in Rosemont.

Dolce Hamilton Park, NJ

Located 20 minutes from Newark Airport in North Jersey, this flagship Dolce conference center – set on 13 acres of woodlands and with 2,000 guest rooms – offers 27,000 square feet of meeting space including breakout rooms, board rooms, even computer labs. Meeting rooms feature professional sound systems, available high-speed Internet access, and a videoconferencing system that lets meeting planners beam in appearances by those who couldn’t attend. Much favored by New Jersey’s many big pharmaceutical companies, the Dolce Hamilton Park is a prime for-instance of a solid, contemporary conference center that is very close to its customers but also gives participants the feeling that they are getting away – in this case, to the woods of northern New Jersey.

Scottsdale Resort & Conference Center

A Benchmark Hospitality property located in the thick of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the Scottsdale Resort & Conference Center offers meeting rooms to accommodate groups from no bigger than a handful up to 1,000 and more. A resort boasting point: Its meeting rooms offer near-perfect acoustics and, importantly, sound insulation also ensures that your meeting stays private. An onsite Media Center offers state-of-the-art digital video editing as well as highly capable video support services. Proof of how extraordinary meetings at the Scottsdale Resort are: accounting giant Deloitte & Touche has met there so often, it persuaded the resort to allow it to have its own dedicated meeting rooms on the property. (And when Deloitte & Touche isn’t using those facilities, they are available to other organizations.) To keep the Scottsdale Resort & Conference Center up to the ever-tougher standards of first-class Phoenix area hotels, the property recently finished a $20 million renovation that even includes three 2,300-foot Presidential Suites that offer top-grade sleeping quarters along with ample room for hosting VIP receptions and holding intimate meetings.

Surprised by the range of conference facilities? The bottom line is that this is a highly diverse industry with ample ways of serving the small- to midsize-meetings markets. “Meetings today assume various sizes and shapes, and they have varying budgets,” says Dolce. “The conference center industry provides the facilities to meet all those needs.”

Extra Assurance

Want a last argument for meeting at a conference center? When you book into a conference center, “you’ll get a dedicated conference planner to help make sure your meeting is exactly what you want,” says Tory Parks, director of sales for Del Lago Resort, a conference center outside Houston. “Our staff planner quarterbacks your event,” agrees Dolce. The planner’s job description is simple: He or she is there to provide whatever assistance you need. Have a complaint? A worry? Tell your planner whose job it is to navigate the conference center’s management on your behalf and get the resolution you need. This is a particular plus for the many part-time meeting planners tasked with organizing outside events – the conference-center planner is there to help even first-timers put on events without a hitch. But even experienced meeting planners admit there are challenges in putting on events in a different facility – who knows how to get green tea bags from the catering staff for a break? – but this is where a conference center’s staff planners excel. They know the facility, but they also know their job is to be your advocate. And that puts insider knowledge on your side.

But maybe there is one more, important reason to consider conference centers for an upcoming meeting: “Book a meeting here, and that sends the right message,” says Parks, who explains that many organizations are finding it problematic to book into high-end hotels. Luxury just is the wrong note as far as many constituencies are concerned, and organizations throughout North America are striving to project an earnest, appropriately cost-conscious image. And conference centers – despite the luxuries many now offer – project exactly the right image. “We are about productivity; that’s why people book into a conference center,” says Parks. And just maybe there is a little golf, tennis and good food on the side.