Do not click this link unless you have a lot of time to waste: 50 best comedy sketches of all time

Remember that story I posted about a few days ago about the Westin Casuarina charging attendees when the host of a meeting held last fall didn’t pay up? Well, it looks like they’re doing the right thing and refunding the charges to attendees’ credit cards.

Here’s a great quote from the meeting organizer, the Coaching Center:

Suzanne Black, owner and president of the Coaching Center, said the hotel’s actions damaged the center’s reputation and its relationship with clients.

“They should have never done this,” Black said. “This was damaging to them and it’s damaging to people’s experience of Las Vegas, and it may potentially hurt our reputation.”

Ya think? Actually, I hate to break it to her, but the Center damaged its own rep first by not paying up. The hotel just exacerbated an already bad situation, IMHO.

A lot of people don’t, it would appear from reading this post on Joan Eisenstodt’s blog. She outlines just a few of the ethically challenged scenarios planners and hospitality partners face all the time, and notes that many don’t seem to understand why that particular carrot (say, you get an iPod for booking business with us) is a little on the slimy side.

The biggest issue, as I noted in a comment there, is that, ethical or not, these come-ons work, and not all just because some people don’t understand why certain practices are wrong. I think a lot of people know it’s wrong and do it anyway–take that fam to Hawaii even if you’ll never plan a meeting there, or book that hotel over another for personal points–maybe as a reward for other parts of the job that seem unfair, kind of as a way to balance it out. But that doesn’t make it right.

So the problem is two-fold: Educating those who really don’t get why it’s wrong to profit personally from a business decision, and trying to get those who get the idea but somehow can justify it to themselves to cut it out. The former will be infinitely easier to do than the latter, I’m afraid.

I try to check out all the social networking stuff that’s out there, seeing as it all likely has/will have meetings-related applications. I’ve been resisting Twitter, a micro-blogging application where you can tell others what you’re doing minute to minute in 140 characters or less (more on Twitter here).

I signed up a while back, but have totally ignored it until recently. But I can resist no longer, especially after reading these posts.

In Twitterland, they call me spelletier. Tweet on.

I love it when someone takes something most of us give no thought to–say, room service menus–and give it some real attention. That’s what Michael Chaffin does in this post on ways to jazz up room service menus. I like some of his suggestions, particularly posting it online with lots of photos and guest comments about the various selections. A commenter took it a bit further, saying,

How about we kill less trees, avoid the head ache of replacing the menus, and offer it via the television and on the Internet. Both of these solutions exist now and can be implemented with an interface to the POS (if the POS has the receiving end).

Brilliant! Why aren’t we doing this?

What else should we stop taking for granted and put some thought into?