Forget the designer shampoo and in-room coffee pots: What today’s business traveler most wants is wireless Internet access, according to this article from hotel-online.

“About 6,000 hotels around the world now provide Wi-Fi access, according to Pyramid Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm. By 2007, the number will grow to 25,000, said Anshu Dua, a senior analyst at Pyramid.”

And here I am lugging a laptop that can’t connect without the good ole wires…and I totally disagree about the in-room coffee pots, which I can’t believe we lived without for so long.

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meeting: Gathering where minutes are kept, but hours are lost.
Nominated by Roxy Gwynn

Courtesy of www.buzzwhack.com.

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Attention association planners: According to an article in Operations and Fulfillment magazine, you only get two chances to make a good impression—or rather, make two bad ones and your attendees might be out of there.

The article talks about a newly released customer service survey commissioned by billing and CRM product/service provider Amdocs. Among the key findings, says the article:

- More than 75% of consumers would hang up on a call to customer service if placed on hold for longer than five minutes.
- More than 80% of consumers polled would rather visit the dentist, pay their taxes, or sit in a traffic jam than deal with an unhelpful representative.
- 75% say they will tell friends and family about negative customer service experiences.
- 85% of consumers report that negative customer service experiences will drive them to switch providers.
- Consumers believe that a loss of business is the biggest motivator for companies to improve their customer service.”

So the next time an attendee whines to you about the room temperature, or the food, or that their bed is too hard, grin and bear it—-or follow the advice in this article from ICP magazine.

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A while back I mentioned seatguru.com, which lets people know where the good (and awful) seats are on different types of planes on U.S. airlines. Now thanks to James Spellos at meetingu.com, I hear there’s a similar site that focuses on international airlines, from Air Canada to Quantas: Seatexpert.com.

While a bad seat on a domestic hop is bad, it’s even worse on a seven-hour ride overseas—definitely worth bookmarking, in my book anyway.

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