PCMA is offering a free issues forum on international travel issues for meeting attendees and exhibitors on February 23. Called, “Visas, Customs, and Customer Service: Making Life Easier for International Meeting Attendees and Exhibitors,” the forum will be “broadcast live from the WTTW public television studios in Chicago, and will be viewed by a live studio audience, which will have an opportunity to pose questions to the panelists. PMCA also plans to offer the Issues Forum as a live teleconference, and a streaming video of the program will be posted on the PCMA Web site the day after the session.”

For more information and to register, click here or contact Glen C. Ramsborg, PhD, Senior Director of Education for PCMA, at 312-423-7262 or gramsborg@pcma.org.

Speaking of international issues, here at the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education, a meeting I’m attending in San Francisco right now, I had an interesting conversation yesterday with some CME providers who have a large international component to their U.S.-based programs. In addition to the usual visa and letters of invitation hassles, one planner said her presenters were getting stopped at customs for the big tubes they carry their posters in. She found a site online (I’ll try to find out where) where they can upload their posters and have them printed out on site. The idea drew some serious oohs and aahs from the rest of the group. If anyone knows what site she was talking about, please let me know so I can share it with the rest of you guys. Sounded like a great idea to me.

While I’m feeling cranky, I might as well crank on. Why do hotels always put the towels on the wall farthest from the shower? I hate putting the towels on the toilet, but I hate even more slip-sliding across the room to grab one. And no in-room coffee pot? Aack! I almost croaked when I saw that missing last night (I am NOT a mornning person). And no minibar–I was starved, since I sat in the back of the plane last night and all they had left was meatloaf (I’m a semi-vegetarian) by the time they got to us in the hinterlands. At least the windows open and the bed is double-sheeted, two things I really like in a hotel room.

Then there was the front desk guy last night, who was nice enough. But when the woman in front of me said, “This is a smoking room, right? That’s what I reserved,” and he replied, “No, of course not. You shouldn’t smoke anyway, it’s bad for you.” Yeah right, like she’s going to quit an addiction because the hotel couldn’t honor its commitment to give her the type of room she reserved. If she had been a nonsmoker in a smoking room, do ya think he would have told her, “well, you might as well start, then?” I think not. Then he proceeded to tell her to call in the morning and ask again, since “no one’s going to actually pay attention to your request unless you make a pain of yourself.” Whether you relate to her plight or not, this is not what I’d call great customer service. I hope it gets better, or that I get less cranky, as time goes on…

And you wonder why attendees name travel hassles as one of their top reasons for not attending a conference…my experience yesterday was a case in point (look out, rant coming on).

I left my house at around 9 a.m. to catch a 12:30 flight from Boston’s Logan airport. Sure, it’d gotten two feet of snow, but that was a couple of days ago, and reports were that everything was back on track. Wrong! First, it took me three hours to get from one side of Boston to the other, instead of the usual 15 minutes or so. I have no idea why; the roads were clear. Just stopped traffic as far as the eye could see. So I was already pushing it. Then when I got to Central Parking, they shoved me off to the “economy lot” way out in the hinterlands. Like a good little sheep, I went over there, and waited in line for 45 minutes to pre-pay (they had two guys in a van taking credit cards–it took forever). Then another wait on the bus to take me to the terminal, filled with very cranky people who also were about to miss their flights.

So I go to the United desk to try to book a later flight. But no, even though it doesn’t say it anywhere on my paperwork, my flight actually was operated by US Air, so I had to schlep all my stuff over to the next terminal, where the US Air guy made fun of me for going to the wrong ticket counter–he actually yelled to the next person in line, “Can you believe she did something that stupid?!” Then he said he couldn’t help me, I should go back over to United to see if they could get me on one of their flights.

So I dragged my bags back across the seemingly endless miles between terminals to get back to United, where the counterperson tells me I can try to go standby on their next two flights. I didn’t make the 3:30, but hung around and got on the 6 p.m., even though the first ticket agent told me it was oversold. When I went back after not making the 3:30, I went back and got a different person who said it actually had plenty of seats, and he confirmed me on the flight.

When I finally got into San Francisco, of course my bag was nowhere around. The helpful baggage people actually told me to chase down that guy with a cartful of bags that he was taking to storage. So I ran across baggage claim and sure enough, there was my bag. Almost there.

Then the scariest cab ride I’ve ever had–his speedometer clocked over 100 mph at one point–and I finally got to the hotel around 10:30 p.m.–1:30 a.m. East Coast time.

When people complain about the hassles of travel, boy can I relate! But I’m sure the conference I’m attending (the Alliance for Continuing Medical Education’s annual meeting) will make all the hassle worthwhile.

The opening general session speaker at this year’s HCEA meeting is a standout—a commedian named Greg Schwen, who obviously did a lot of research for this gig. I have never seen a presentation that was so customized—he goofed on this industry’s acronyms, HCEA itself, all the various different regulations, and the meeting planning industry, and we just roared. This is at 8 on a Sunday morning, mind you. I love this line: Delta: Darn, everything leaves through Atlanta. Well, it was funny when he said it…

According to a recent study by Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown and Russell, things are looking good for meetings. “The meeting market is likely to grow in the next 12 months. Corporate meeting planners are planning to book an additional 4.2 off-site meetings in the next 12 months, while association meeting planners are planning to book an additional 1.2 off-site meetings.”

The top 10 factors corporate meeting planners say they are extremely or very concerned with are (in descending order):
* Making the meeting agenda relevant
* Convention services staff
* Room rates
* Accessibility of the destination by air
* Cost of food, beverage, entertainment at the destination
* Cost of flying to the destination
* Availability of low cost air carrier service to the destination
* Hotels or resort security services
* Internet access from all meeting rooms
* Meeting attendance projections
* AV company services
* Adequacy of high speed Internet service

The top 10 factors association meeting planners say they are extremely or very concerned with are (in descending order):
* Making the agenda relevant
* Room rates
* Convention services staff
* Meeting attendance projections
* Cost of food, beverage and entertainment at the destination
* Accessibility of the destination by air
* Cost of flying to the destination
* The popularity of the destination
* Availability of low cost air carrier service to the destination
* Availability of new/interesting speakers
* The popularity of the hotel/resort
* Accessibility of the destination by car

The study also found that attendees are still demanding, and planners are still stressed out. Not a shocker. Also, the report found that planners are using hotel Web sites more than ever, and they really like online meeting room floor plans, meeting room capacity charts, and detailed destination maps.

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Preferred Hotels and Resorts recently sent around a press release outlining their latest enticement to get planners to book with their properties:

Meeting and events planners can receive funding of more than $2,000 towards their professional development if they book meetings in properties within The Conference Collection…The level of financial contribution is based on the volume of room nights booked at single or multiple venues.

For more than 300 room nights taken within a year, The Conference Collection will pay up to $500 towards registering for the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) program, or up to $800 towards the Certified Meeting Planners (CMP) course.

If a planner books more than 600 room nights within a year, they can claim up to $2000 towards the Certified Meetings Manager (CMM) program.

This is a little different, in my opinion, from the usual inducements of everything from personal vacations to iPods, which I believe ethical planners should turn down as a matter of course since the perk goes to the individual, not the organization, and it’s probably not in the organization’s best interests to have site selection decisions based on personal gifties. But this one, while it is a personal benefit, also benefits the organization by having a better educated (one would hope!) meeting planner. But it’s a fine line, and I could see arguing that this falls on the other side of it.

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Stephanie Downs at ConferBlog brought this one to my attention: a new, wireless videoconferencing system that she says will "the concept of the ‘meeting room’ goes out of the window, literally."

Instead of being stuck in one location, now you can videoconference while walking around, powered by batteries. While I can see it would be useful for a lot of types of meetings, I seriously doubt it’ll revolutionize the industry.

Speaker Joel Saltzman sent me some articles today that actually made me stop and think. In one of them, he asks, “How are you having fun today?”

And it did get me thinking. I’ve been so busy all week playing catch-up after vacation, before leaving for a conference next Tuesday, that it’s kind of been like, “Fun? What’s that?” No wonder my brain has had such a hard time adjusting from vacation to everyday life. But he doesn’t ask, “are you having fun today”; he asks how, with the underlying assumption that of course you are having fun–how are you doing it? And I am, actually, having kind of a low-grade fun fever, now that I stop to think about it. Catching up on all my reading is pretty fun, at least some of it. Knowing that you all are reading this babbling is really fun. An e-mail earlier today from my sister made me laugh out loud. And after 10 days on a small sailboats, I’ve gained a new appreciation for hot water showers, flush toilets, cutting vegetables on a non-moving counter, and being able to get drinking water from a faucet, rather than taking all the cushions off a seat to rummage around in the storage area underneath. And, of course, the sight of my nine-year-old dog romping like a puppy in the snow is enough to make me take a quick break and join him.

As Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Suess) said, “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”

So, how are you having fun today?

Oh, and I almost forgot–check out the Washington Post’s annual “word” list, where by adding/subtracting/changing a letter to a word, you give it a whole new meaning. I can’t find it online, but my colleague e-mailed the list over earlier today. My favorites:
sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person
who doesn’t get it.

hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when
they come at you rapidly.

arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve
accidentally walked through a spider web.

Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your
bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

I’m so excited that I just have to share our good news with you–we just found out that Medical Meetings is a finalist for a Neal Award for Best News Coverage for an article I wrote last fall called Stark Raving Mad.

The Neal Awards are a pretty big deal for us journalist types, so I am way beyond happy!!