Mickie over at We Have Always Done It That Way has a must-read post for association meeting planners about how just providing tracks at your conference isn’t enough: You have to put the information in context. From her post:

Here are a few ideas for a context-rich conference:
Change the way you organize conferences. Don’t just plan lots of individual sessions. Tracks are better, but not enough. Plan the track as a coordinated curriculum and have speakers work together to build upon each other’s sessions.
Provide pre-conference recommended readings to attendees to set the stage for the material they are about to learn
Encourage speakers to build meaningful case studies and problem-solving activities into their sessions.
Build lots of peer-to-peer sharing into the event, both structured and unstructured.
Continue the conversations post-conference with list-serve discussions or online communities.

Another point I’d like to add is that context also means putting the content into the context of your attendees’ real lives. I’ve been to too many sessions for my own profession where the ideas are great, wow, I’d love to do it here. But, unlike the presenters, we don’t have the resources to make it happen. There are so many barriers to making something learned turn into something done, and a lot of it comes down to gearing the information to the reality of your attendees’ environment—their context, not the organization’s, and not the presenter’s. This is an issue the continuing medical education community struggles with daily; I’d like to see more thought go into it in other areas as well.

What does that Canadian attendee mean when they tell you to “keep your stick on the ice”? If your American attendee told you he was going to “take the dog” to get to the meeting, should you look into pet-friendly housing? The answers to these and many, many more questions about catchwords, idioms, and slang from countries around the world can be found at WhatDoesThatMean. Plus, it’s just fun to poke around to see all the different buzzwords.

I’d like to add a bit to this news item about the Alliance of Meeting Management Consultants Business Forum next month in Texas. The lineup sounds good, and from my personal experience with the organizers—MaryAnne Bowbrow, CAE, CMP, who has been involved in the association and meetings industry for more than 15 years; Cris Canning, CMP, head instigator of Hospitality Ink, a marketing communications consultancy specializing in the hospitality industry; and Daphne J. Meyers, CMM, the managing partner of Red Barn Group, LLC, a firm specializing in strategic meeting and event best practices—they won’t let you down. Plus, it’s only $50. I can’t go, unfortunately, but if you do, please drop me a line and let me know how it went.

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S., a day to remember those who have died in service to their country. Thank you is too small a thing to say for all you’ve done to keep us free, but it’s all I have. Thank you.

Yesterday I attended a one-day conference for business media people like yours truly. The agenda on the Web site looked terrific, and this organization has a great reputation. While the presenters were really good, and the small size (just two of us in the audience at one session) made for interesting and intimate conversation, there were some major problems.

Number 1: They rejiggered the schedule at the last minute without informing registrants. So someone who planned to drive from New Hampshire into Boston later to catch a later session she really wanted to go to while missing rush-hour traffic ended up missing the session, too. She said she had checked the schedule on the association’s Web site that morning, too, to make sure nothing had changed. She was a bit miffed, to put it mildly.

Number 2: It didn’t start on time. It was supposed to start at 9 a.m. with a welcoming address from the association’s regional governor, but no one was there. No one informed us of anything. We sat around, chatting and having some coffee, and when I looked at my watch and saw it was 9:30, I freaked out and went to the person at the reg desk to see if maybe it was being held in a different room and I was missing it. She said that it would start sometime soon. Eventually, it did.

Number 3: Three of the 10 sessions were cancelled with no notice. In one case, one of the organizers came into the room of a session that was ongoing to say the next one was cancelled, with no explanation, just an interruption.

Number 4: On the schedule they handed out on site, it ended a full hour sooner than the original schedule said it would. Which would have been fine, since that meant I didn’t have to deal with the traffic both ways, but it would have been nice to know ahead of time so my honey wouldn’t have had to leave work early to come home and feed the hounds. And the schedule change wasn’t due to the cancelled sessions, since those were still on the new agenda. I don’t get it.

Number 5: There weren’t any people with physical disabilities there, as far as I could tell, which was a good thing. The breakfast and lunch were two longish flights down from the meeting rooms, and the only elevators were on the far other side of the building from both the banquet room and the meeting spaces.

Fortunately, the presenters were good, and one session gave me a lot of takeaways we can use here at work, but I was really disappointed at the sloppiness of it all. I wasn’t going to post about it, though, until they sent me a link to an online evaluation just now, and it went to a meeting on a totally different topic! I mean, c’mon guys, that’s ridiculous. And what’s worse (for us editor-types, anyway), there was a typo on it (and on the meeting agenda).

There’s a new meeting planning/hospitality/business travel blog in town called MeetingsMaven. Cool! I’m grooving on it so far. Some recent posts:

WiFi spotting and yet more airline fees
Calculating the cost of turnover (in hotels)
Is there no such thing as privacy anymore?
Sometimes bending the rules just makes sense
Laptops in the audience

We’re all so used to tipping that, when we hit someplace that has a service charge in lieu of tipping, we tip anyway (I do, at least). Here’s an interesting comparison of voluntary tipping, service charges, and service-inclusive pricing, developed by Cornell University School of Hotel Administration professor Michael Lynn (who I had the pleasure of interviewing a while back for this article on tipping). As he says in the Cornell e-newsletter I got yesterday,

“Tipping may not be as advantageous as managers seem to believe,” Lynn said. “What I’ve done is to identify nine factors to consider in determining what is the best way to cover the cost of service employees. I cannot advise an operator which policy is best, but I can frame the analysis.”

Remember not too long ago when I posted about airlines thinking about charging for aisle seats? Well, this satire piece from the Borowitz Report goes one step further: Airlines to Stow Passengers in Overhead Bins: Bold New Strategy to Boost Sagging Revenues.

“Stowing passengers in the overhead bins should allow us to squeeze a few extra dollars out of every flight, and right now, every extra dollar counts,” said Carol Foyler, a spokesperson for the airlines group. “Plus, since they’ll be stuffed up there for the duration of the flight, we won’t have to give them peanuts.”

Ha! Or maybe it’s not so funny after all. While they’re not saying where they plan to make the cuts, American plans to cut $1 billion in the next year. OK, I’ll take that cozy spot over 24F next to the shopping bag and the carry-on…

We all have been the beneficiaries of the so-called bed wars, where hotels—Westin was the first, but everyone soon piled on—got the idea that guests were there mainly to sleep, and would really appreciate somewhere comfy to lay our heads. Then bathrooms got spiffed up, and the bed wars turned into the amenity wars. But with all that focus on the “stuff,” did we lose the customer service focus?

I was reading this article in Travel Weekly about just this idea, and it seems like I’m not the only one who’s noticed that while the stuff got better, the service did not. I read all those stories about housekeepers in pain from having to change the sheets on the heavenly, yet heavier, beds, and pain can definitely make a person grumpy. But with some hotels now offering kiosk check-in, what’s the excuse for front desk staff being more cold than cordial? Not at the Ritz-Carltons of the world, of course, but once you move down a rung or two on the luxury ladder, service has seemed to slide a bit. Fortunately, it sounds like some chains are noticing, and putting programs in place to improve. From the article:

• Holiday Inns created People Notice, a hands-on training program to instill a service culture.

• Country Inns & Suites rolled out Be Our Guest to ensure a “warm welcome and a good stay” and ran its brand-first TV advertising to herald the program.

• Marriott introduced Spirit to Serve Our Guests, a five-part initiative to cover every part of the guest experience, from reservations through the stay to follow-up.

• Westin is redesigning its service approach around the brand’s Personal Renewal repositioning.

With the high turnover rates in the hospitality business, though, the training will need to be regular and ongoing to have an impact. Here’s hoping it works.

Joan Eisenstodt, meetings maven extraordinaire, list mistress of the MiForum Google group, brave leader of Eisenstodt & Associates, etc., etc., etc. (she does a lot) has been named Meeting Partner of the Year by the National Speakers Association. Her work with industry associations, other professional speakers, and as a role model to other meeting professionals helped earn her this honor, which will be formally presented at the NSA National Convention in July in Orlando. Congratulations, Joan!