If you or your attendees suffer from “Blackberry hand,” help is on the way. According to a press release I just got, The Spa at Camelback Inn has added a 30-Minute “Berry” Thumb Conditioning treatment that “It focuses on pressure points and has a learning component. Guests are taught thumb exercises and thumb stretches to prevent and treat aches from overusing the BlackBerry (something almost impossible not to do!)” The Hashani spa at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Resort also is offering a
30-Minute “Berry Break” hand massage that “begins with the guest holding a warm stone in each hand while their hands are wrapped in warm towels infused with blackberry or other seasonal scent” and goes on from there, ending with a cup of blackberry tea.

Groups can order the latter, but they have to leave their PDAs behind.

When it’s coming from meetings displaced from New Orleans, it is, according to this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Mark Vaughan doesn’t normally try to talk convention planners out of bringing their business to Atlanta, but that’s exactly what he’s been doing lately with groups committed to holding meetings in rival New Orleans.

Atlanta has gotten a boost from the 10 conventions with about 122,000 attendees that will relocate here over the next two years because of Hurricane Katrina. Yet when groups approach Vaughan and other Atlanta officials about moving a show, the first thing they do is encourage organizers to keep the event in New Orleans.

“We tell them we would prefer they respect their contract and honor their agreement with New Orleans,” said Vaughan, executive vice president of sales and marketing for the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, an agency that recruits meetings to Georgia’s capital. “We are trying to be a good neighbor.”

Atlanta also is a partner with New Orleans in promoting the region, along with Nashville. While I applaud the sentiment, if the meeting is leaving NOLA no matter what, it makes sense for another Southern city to pick it up and keep the region humming. I’m hoping for the best when conventions start heading back to the Big Easy this spring, but I still have reservations on how prepared the city will be to handle a large convention. I hope I’m wrong.

P.S. Here’s an interesting article on measuring the cost of hotel interruption from Katrina, from hotel-online.

Who would have thought it? According to a press release, six major conventions and tradeshows—The American Baseball Coaches Association, the Mid-American Horticultural Trade Show, the International Air-Conditioning, Heating, Refrigerating Expo, and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons—are heading to Chicago in January, bringing about $60 million to the city.

I know the Society of Thoracic Surgeons is a relocation from New Orleans (as is the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, which is headed to Chicago in March), since I talked to them for an article in Medical Meetings, but it sounds like the others were already on the books. I bet the Chicago CVB has its party hat on—what a way to start 2006.

That’s the question The Economist tackled recently. It evaluated 127 cities around the world on a number of factors, which, according to the Times Online, include:

the quality of public transport, the availability of high-quality hotels, the extent of social and religious restrictions and the quality of healthcare in the city. One of the more unusual factors used to assess business cities is the cost of buying Time magazine or an equivalent.

The methodology reflects the Economist’s belief that the cost of being in a city is no longer the only factor. Many business travel indices rank cities on the basis of average per diem rates paid to business travellers visiting the city, given that it is the traveller’s company who is footing the bill.

Three Canadian cities top the list: Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto. The top U.S. cities were a little surprising: Honolulu (#5, OK, that’s not a big surprise), Cleveland (6), Pittsburgh (11), Atlanta (13), and Boston (15). New York barely squeaked into the top 50 (tied with Madrid in the 47th spot). Anyway, it’s pretty interesting. You can download the list from a link in the Times Online article.

OK, so maybe new slogan isn’t going to send people running to Georgia, but at least it’s not as bad as some of what the public in New Jersey have come up with. According to USA Today, these include:

New Jersey: You Got a Problem With That?
NJ: How You Doin’?!
Most of Our Elected Officials Have Not Been Indicted.
New Jersey: It Always Smells Like This.

The program began last month after acting Gov. Richard J. Codey rejected a consultant’s recommendation — “New Jersey: We’ll Win You Over” — as too negative. That slogan, developed as part of a $260,000 contract by global image consultants Lippincott Mercer, was shelved a day before it was to be unveiled.

Personally, I kind of like “The Ocean, The Motion, The Magic,” but then again, it’s been a while since I’ve been there. At least the local residents seem to have a sense of humor about the whole thing.

A lot of marketing folks do, like David Burn and Katharine Stone. The offending slogan?

Atlanta: every day is an opening day.

I have to agree—couldn’t they come up with something a little snappier, especially for those of us who aren’t baseball fanatics (except when the Red Sox are playing well, of course)? And the new theme song, well, I agree with one of the Metroblogger commenters that it “sounds like a poorly performed piece from American Idol.”

But who am I to judge? The best I could come up with for a name for this blog is “face2face”!

Ironically, Bangladesh officials are rousting beggars from the streets of Dhaka as the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation meeting comes to town. Ironic, because the association’s mission is to provide “a platform for the peoples of South Asia to work together in a spirit of friendship, trust and understanding. It aims to promote the welfare of the peoples of South Asia and to improve their quality of life through accelerated economic growth, social progress and cultural development in the region.” According to Adda:

Dhaka city has become off limit to beggars as they may cause embarrassment and security concern in front of the foreign dignitaries. Police force has actively worked to apprehend most beggars that range from 27,000 to 100,000. Their presence in the capital city will definitely undermine the SAARC agenda for poverty alleviation in South Asian countries!!!

Kind of reminds me of a U.S. city that I read did a serious campaign to clean up the homeless around its convention center when a meetings industry conference came to town…

For updates on the attacks on the Radisson SAS Hotel (guests evacuated), go to radisson.com, or call the corporate office at (402) 501-5000. For the Hyatt, check hyatt.com, or call the information hotline at (402) 935-5348. No news yet on the Days Inn Web site.

MSNBC’s article about the attacks is here. No word yet on if there were any meetings going on at the time.

For news from local Jordanian bloggers on the scene, click here.

This has got to stop.

A guest post from regular Meetings Group writer Kay Carstens:

Ballot initiative 1A passed in Denver earlier this month boosting the lodging tax for Denver hotels by 1%, from 13.85 % of a hotel bill to 14.85% starting in 2006. In dollars, that’s another $4.2 million a year. The Denver Metro CVB will use at least $2.5 million of the proceeds to market the expanded Colorado Convention Center and the Hyatt headquarters hotel. The DMCVB proposed and sponsored the ballot initiative, according to CVB President Richard Scharf. Downtown hotels got on the bandwagon despite the increase in room rates to guests, because a full convention center means increased hotel business. Taxpayers backed it because they won’t have to pay it, and, as Scharf told the Business Journal, “”This tax affects only people staying in hotels,” Scharf said. “So visitors pay a little more, and we benefit a lot.”

From Sue: How many times have we heard this one before? Eventually, you end up cutting off your nose to spite your face with this kind of attitude toward visitors…

It sounds like Miami is moving on, post-Wilma. Even though the power is still out in some areas, the airport is open, the mandatory curfew is lifted, and the New Cardiovascular Horizons Conference, which had be relocated to Miami from New Orleans after Katrina, began as scheduled on Thursday.

The CVB also reports that almost “95 percent of hotels and restaurants on Miami Beach and downtown Miami are open for business and receiving guests. The majority of hotels in other areas of Miami-Dade County are open; of those which are closed, most are due to remaining power outages. Most shopping malls are open for business. The majority of attractions are prepared to open when power is fully restored. There is minimal, if any, beach erosion in the Greater Miami area as a result of the storm.”

And that, my friends, is all good news.