It’s just common sense, but I think it bears repeating: Take some time to scan your meeting space for its effects on all five senses. For some great advice on how to conduct an environmental scan, check out this post from The Forum Effect. I particularly found this tip useful:

This is an additional element that is not one of the five senses, but crucial nonetheless. Take a moment to observe both worker and participant behavior. Make sure staff are keeping private discussions out of earshot. Watch participants to see if they’re encountering problems. Perhaps they can’t find the restrooms or have lost their pen. By observing behavior, you’ll be able to quickly and effectively keep participants focused on the reason they’re there: the meeting.

Driving home last night, I could not believe the invective I was hearing on a talk radio show about the recently held AIG incentive, which happened at a posh resort shortly after the company received $85 billion in government loans. I could practically see the host foaming at the mouth as she called for the Attorney General to sue AIG on behalf of the American public to get the money back. Everyone is piling on the get-those-b*()$#@Q bandwagon, it seems–even the President’s spokesperson has weighed in, calling the $440,000 incentive trip despicable.

After getting more heat today, the company canceled another incentive planned for next week. Now another financial institution, Wachovia, is starting to feel some heat too over a planned cruise incentive to the Grecian Islands. (Update: Now AIG’s put the hold on all future offsite meetings, pending further review.)

As a citizen, I can’t help but feel awfully outraged too at all this conspicuous consumption going on at a time when we the people are coughing up a lot of cash just to keep the financial system afloat. As caller after caller said on that radio show last night, why should they get to fiddle with our money while the system burns down around them? And it just feels good to have an actual target of well-spa’d faces for all this outrage and general unhappiness we’re all feeling as we watch our portfolios continue to shrink as markets continue to tumble and the Fed’s actions continue to not seem to do much good in stabilizing things.

And yet…

The AIG meeting was an incentive, folks. Who if not you and I should understand that incentives are not, in fact, junkets for fat cats to roll around in our dough and laugh at us suckers for not being fortunate enough to be them. There’s a reason that sales incentives trips have been a staple in business for, well, just about forever. I even got to cover one once, and while, OK, the biking in the mountains around Banff was definitely not work, the sales people were talking business with each other. I could practically see their competitiveness come out at dinners where they talked about what they were already doing to try to qualify for the next one. And the executives who attended weren’t there for a holiday; they were there to keep those high-producing sales people focused on selling their products, fill them in on how their business works, and give them tools to do their job better. (Update: A colleague just reminded me that incentives generally are considered to be taxable income to the participants. That’s another important piece that has gotten lost in the hoopla.)

Not a junket. Not a boondoggle. An incentive. There is a big difference.

Especially in a lousy fiscal environment, you want the pieces of a financial company that are still doing well to do even better, to pick up the slack for all those billions other pieces are losing. That means incentives.

There’s a lot to be said for perception being reality, and it’s something I’ve seen come increasingly true for pharmaceutical companies, which now are really good at both stripping out the excesses and hiding their sales travel incentives from public view. It was only a matter of time before financial services followed suit. Looks like that time has come.

And while it was, I think, a very poor decision to carry on with the incentive instead of swallowing what I’m sure would have been a roughly equivalent cost in cancellation fees for last week’s event, I can’t fault AIG too much for going through with it. A promise is a promise, and those folks went out and did their jobs specifically knowing this was what they’d get if they did really well. Should they be punished for bad decisions made in areas completely outside their realm?

Bottom line? If I had been planning that trip, I would have tried to postpone it until Q109 or later, like all the other corporate meeting planners appear to be doing with their fall meetings (if at all possible), and I would have tried to trim as much of the fat out as I could. I do believe that those high-producing agents should have gotten the travel rewards for a job well done they were promised, but the timing could not have been worse. I’m sure they would have understood having to wait a few months until things start turning around again.

And now the American public has a whipping boy for all their financial angst: An incentive. This is not good for business, folks–yours, ours, the government’s, or anyone’s.

Who else but Patti Shock should be the one to write the book on meetings-related food and beverage? And write it she did: A Meeting Planner’s Guide to Catered Events. In addition to writing F&B columns for our magazines, Patti is professor and director of distance learning with the Harrah College of Hotel Administration, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And she makes for a cute caricature, too.

Here’s one of the best roundups I’ve seen yet about how the credit crunch will affect the U.S. hospitality industry. Written by hotel legal eagle Jim Butler, it includes thoughts both optimistic and pessimistic. For planners, I thought this was a key note:

In public we say “Hold the rate.” That makes sense as long as we can do it. However, I may have courage to hold the rate in New York or Washington, DC, but I may not have courage to do so in Milwaukee when my competitors start cutting.

If it’s not happening already, I expect to see rates slipping in second- and third-tier cities any day now. I’m also hearing more and more talk about the return of the buyer’s market overall. We’ll see.

Trip Advisor’s top travel trends has some interesting tidbits. I particularly liked that Americans chose other Americans as being both the most friendly and the most annoying of travelers. You can tell their main concern is leisure, not group, business by things like the top international destination being Budoni, Sardinia, and domestically having St. George, Utah, in the top spot for 2009.

But the trend toward greener travel and greener destinations I think goes across the board, as is the likelihood of someone pilfering towels from a hotel (20 percent) and the 51 percent who spent more on travel this year than they originally planned to.

Check the link for more on top airports, hotels, airlines, tipping trends, and more.

My colleague just interviewed Fay Beauchine, executive VP of Global Meetings, Incentives & Events, about her views of the current state of the meetings industry. She shared this cost-saving tip, which I wanted to pass along to you:

Consider total taxes (hotel, county, city) as an invisible way to save money on a program. You can shave 30,000 off a program just by choosing a destination with lower taxes. Two states with the lowest taxes: Florida and California.

And they’re not just for hotels. Cruise lines also are thinking fees might be an interesting way to scare up some extra cash by charging where no cruise line has charged before (at least as far as I’m aware)–the main dining room.

According to this report on Tripso, the main dining room at one line now is charging $14.95 for an “all-natural” steak. As Janice Hough says, “Supposedly, it is a trial to see if customers want “all natural” beef and that eventually the steak will be moved to the alternative dining room “Chops” that already carries a surcharge.”

She continues, “Yeah, right. And if Royal Caribbean determines that people will pay extra in the main dining room, I am sure they will go back not to charging for anything there as soon as the trial is done.”

Having never been on a cruise, I wasn’t surprised to hear they charge extra for some things outside the main dining area, but for some reason I thought that everything in there was included. I wonder who/what/where else will be the next front on the fee wars?

Hey, maybe the rest of us can start charging fees, too. I’ll write a good story for my regular salary, but if you want me to write a really good story, it’ll cost you an extra really-good-story fee? Can you even imagine working that way? It’d be a career death sentence in my business.

Thanks to Bill Geist, one of my favorite new-to-me bloggers, for the pointer.

I just got a call that went like this:

Me: This is Sue Pelletier
Her: Stan Pillaster?
Me: No, Sue Pelletier. Who are you trying to reach?
Her: Stan, Stew, something like that. Pillmonger? Pillager?
Me, being helpful: Sue Pelletier, maybe?
Her: I dunno. I guess.
Me: That’d be me. How can I help you?
Her: mumble
Me: What?
Her: mumble mumble press release mumble.
Me: Is this something about a press release?
Her: I guess.
Me: Is there a particular company or topic involved in said press release that you wanted to talk about?
Her: Just wanted to know if you got it and when you’re going to use it.
Me: Well, I can’t tell you that unless you can tell me what it’s about.
Her: It’s that press release that you got. Probably in the last week or two.
Me: I hate to break it to you, but I get more than one a week. Can you maybe look it up and call me back when you have an idea of what it is you want to talk with me about?
Her: Just tell me when you’re going to run it.
Me: Good bye.

I tried to be nice, but I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Please, whenever your organization is communicating with someone important to your business, don’t let it be someone like this. If I had ever gotten a clue who she was calling about, it would have disinclined me to work with them in any way, given the level of incompetence already evident in my dealings with that company. Fortunately for them, she was so bad that I still don’t know who she represented.