Enjoy all those long vacations?
According to this article, convention planning is a great career choice because you get to enjoy nice long vacations when you go on site for a program. Say what?? The article describes it thusly:
- If you can’t take time for a vacation, why not pursue a career where your job is actually an extended tour in paradise? Hotel managers and convention planners help corporate clients book long business meetings at luxurious accommodations in resorts and spas. Your work will seem like a juggling act, but you’ll be ideally situated to get the most of your off hours and long weekends. When the dust settles from a major booking, you can use compensation time for swimming and tanning.
Someone take that writer and have her shadow a meeting planner on site at a conference, please! This is just a tad misleading, don’t you think? Or maybe the writer just read this definition of symposium and thought that nothing much had changed since the ancient Greeks got the whole thing rolling (thanks to Ken for the pointer to that Wikipedia entry!).
Here’s more on the topic, from Meeting News.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:38 am
When I began in the meeting planning field over 17 years ago, I took advantage of being at a great venue and extended my stay to enjoy the sites.
Extending my trip to tour the sites has become more and more of a challenge as the years have progressed. I’m either too exhausted from the long days and nights or simply want to return home to my family.
Friends asked me what exciting things I got to see during a recent planning trip to Cape Town, South Africa - since I was in meetings the vast majority of time, I saw only the hotels and the convention center!
I love what I do and find it very challenging and rewarding! While I might have initially seen this career as an opportunity to see the world, it’s evolved into much more than a vacation opportunity.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:19 am
The person who wrote that article has NEVER been a meeting planner! I have been doing meeting planning for 15 years and no matter how much planning and experience, and attention to the last detail you have, some things just don’t always go the way you want them to! A lot of ’stuff’ happens and you have to be ready and on it immediately. This is not condusive to enjoying a ‘vacation’! Even AFTER the event, I am always so drained that I just want to go home and sleep for 12 hours! After dealing with all of the thousands of details and challenges the very LAST thing I want to do is stick around the hotel and continue to deal with the site staff! Who knows how many new questions will pop up?!
As much as I enjoy the challenge of meeting planning, I am always glad when the event is over, was a success and I am on my way home. My idea of a ‘vacation’ is NOT tacked on to the end of an event. No family or friends to enjoy the location with? Forget it!
My vote it to enjoy what you can before/during/after an event, (and I have had some interesting adventures at a destination) do a great job and then plan your relaxing personal vacation somewhere ELSE!
August 6th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Not sure if anyone has read Tim Ferriss’ book “the-four-hour-work-week” but if not check it out. He talks about how we can have more fun at work and outsource the details to a virtual assitant service like http://findvirtual.com/ and thus make sure that we keep ourselves on the high level stuff without sweating every detail. I just thought that would be a good thing to throw in here as we all talk about what our ideal job would be. ciao
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