Got ethics?
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.
Related Topics: Business stuff
April 11th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
I agree totally with you and Joan. Even before the current wave of “get an iPod for booking” sales pitches, I was always as a planner appalled about the trade off of booking hotel space/rooms for getting oodles of hotel points. Something never felt quite right to me about it.
As I would discuss that in my classes, I came to learn that I was in the minority of that opinion. Very few of my students saw anything wrong with that business deal.
Is there a generational factor at play here (maybe we’re getting too old and not seeing how business has to be done in this new era)? Or is it just wrong, not because of ethics, but because it seems to hurt the smaller vendor who doesn’t have the “goodies” to be able to reward the planners with?
In any case…it still seems wrong to me as well.
Jim
August 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
As important as business ethics are on the planner side, they are also important on the property/sales side as well. During a recent round of site selection, I was contacted by a CVB contact for the city in consideration, one of her sales people was in town and wanted to get together in person to discuss their property etc. Due to tight schedules and other conflicts it became apparent that a dinner meeting was the only option. The venue that was suggested by the salesperson was a very expensive $100/person price-fixe venue. For all three of us. The real problem came when the subject of the destination, property and meeting needs only came up for 5 minutes over dessert!
It was clear to me within 10 minutes of my arrival at dinner that neither the salesperson or the CVB person had any real interest in helping me to see the benefits of their portfolio, I was just the meeting person they could use to justify a more than $300 business expense.
Don’t just blame the planner’s for unethical behavior, and don’t write this experience off as a valid sales tool - I came to the table with concerns that I was afforded no opportunity to discuss.
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