The Accidental Meeting Planner: A Practical Path from Assignment to a Successful Event

The useful part

How new technology tools and greater access to hotel availability, group rates and meeting space are giving occasional planners a simpler path to meeting success Your boss needs an off-site meeting for 25 people next month. That means someone needs to find a hotel, secure guest rooms, determine what meeting space is available and figure out what it will all cost. Somehow, that responsibility has landed on your desk, even though planning meetings was never meant to be a significant part of your job.

How it works

• Greater online visibility into hotel and meeting space availability, group rates and other important details can simplify a process that traditionally required numerous emails, phone calls and follow-ups.
• Before searching for a hotel or meeting venue, establish the basic requirements.
• Every detail does not need to be finalized, but knowing the meeting's purpose, approximate attendance, destination, preferred dates and budget will make the search considerably more productive.
• They also make online sourcing tools more useful because planners can filter out properties that do not meet their needs rather than spending hours reviewing hotels that were never viable choices in the...
• The objective at the beginning is to establish enough parameters to conduct a focused search and understand what options are available.

What to take from it

You should also determine whether attendees will need guest rooms, meeting space or both, along with any important audiovisual, food and beverage, accessibility or other requirements. An RFP is not required for every meeting, and planners should leverage instant booking tools to make coordination faster and more straightforward. International travel, extensive audiovisual production, complicated food and beverage programs, detailed contracts, large room blocks and significant financial commitments can quickly increase the stakes involved in making planning decisions.

Example or evidence

• Employees who occasionally coordinate meetings can concentrate on a few essential decisions while using technology to make sourcing and booking easier to manage.
• These fundamentals provide enough direction to begin identifying realistic options.
• Some details will inevitably change as plans take shape, particularly when several people are involved in making decisions.
• Match the Planning Process to the Meeting One of the first things an aspiring planner should understand is that meetings vary considerably in complexity.

Details worth keeping

A 15-person leadership retreat, a regional training session and a 500-person annual conference may all fall under the broad category of company meetings, but planning them requires very different levels of time, expertise and coordination. Someone unfamiliar with group travel may assume that every meeting requires contacting numerous hotels, sending RFPs, waiting for responses and negotiating each detail. For larger or more complex events, that process may still make sense.

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