David Peckinpaugh’s new position as president of Maritz Travel is big news for sure, but how it gets pushed out to the world can be, well, interesting. Take this account on ancient-wall.com which, as my colleague who scoped this version out this morning so aptly noted, “is so crazy, as if the original press release got translated into another language and then translated back into English.” A brief snippet:

“Today, Maritz announced it has allocated David Peckinpaugh, former vice boss of business expansion for HelmsBriscoe, to boss of Maritz Travel Company, a tellurian personality in meetings, events and inducement travel. Peckinpaugh will assume his purpose Jun 13 and will be obliged for a leadership, vital prophesy and ubiquitous management of Maritz Travel. Interim boss Jane Herod will continue to offer as Maritz Travel’s arch handling officer, expanding her current care purpose within a business.”

Say what??

(Trish Rafferty, I’m dedicating this post to you—enjoy!)

(Update: Please note that this is not Maritz’s work; the original press release is perfectly grammatical and sensible. I don’t know what happened in between their issuing it and this version being published, but it must have been a doozie.)

HotelChatter has come out with its picks for the top hotels for geeks, and I must be one, because I got awfully excited about things like the switch in The Eccelston Square Hotel bathrooms that turns the glass from see-through to opaque, and the Eden Hotel’s batcave.

But what’s really sweet for small meetings are the soon-to-debut Time Square Yotel’s Studiyo meeting/yoga spaces, and its Club Cabins, which according to HotelCHatter (I couldn’t find it on Yotel’s Web site, which is, while cool to look at, really hard to navigate) “are available to rent by the hour or the day (rates are still TBD) and feature white leather banquette seating, a coffee table that can flip out to a full-sized table, a flat-screen TV and a video game console. It’s also wired to work for both business presentations and get this, karaoke.”

Congratulations to the 2011 Harris Poll EquiTrend Travel Brands of the Year:
Airline: Southwest
Full-service hotel: Hilton Hotels
Luxury hotel: Omni
Mid-market hotel: Holiday Inn
Extended Stay: Homewood Suites
Cruise lines: Norwegian Cruise Line
Rental cars: Enterprise
Amusement attractions: Disney World

Keys to success seem to be providing good value, choice, flexibility, and transparency.

I’m kind of surprised hotels haven’t been doing this long before now, but it sounds like a few are starting to use RFID chips to keep track of their linens—and nab towel thieves before they sneak out the door with their ill-gotten goods. One hotel says it’s already saving $16,000 a month in pool towel theft reduction.

As someone who tries to keep luggage to carry-on size (and I know from the stuffed state of the overhead bins these days that I’m far from alone) and has no interest in snagging hotel linens, I would think the fee for having to check a bag big enough to stuff a towel in would pretty much cancel out the value of the towel and make them not worth stealing. It sounds like it’s still a big, expensive problem, and this could be an easy solution. I am curious how they confront the towel thieves, though. Talk about awkward!

Remember the Brookings report? You know, when Heywood Sanders, professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said that the convention center market was, according to an article we published in 2005 when the report came out, “oversaturated, that demand won’t catch up with supply any time soon, and that convention centers, by and large, are not meeting economic impact expectations.”

Not surprisingly, most in this industry, including IAEE, thought he was full of hooey. Eventually it all quieted down, and convention centers—most recently Philadelphia’s—went back to expanding.

But as I read the Boston Globe this morning, I came across this column that cites Sanders in an argument against building a 1,000-room hotel near the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and eventually doubling the size of the BCEC itself.

When asked why the forecasts for room nights booked due to the BCEC so far have proved to be a bit optimistic, Jim Rooney, who heads the authority in charge of the BCEC, says in the Globe column that the emphasis should be more on snagging the big biotech, medical device, and financial shows the BCEC currently is too small to accommodate (hence the need to expand the center) than on “how many people slept in the Westin.”

I’m no city planner, but I’ve always been of the mind that we should beef up development around the BCEC, including hotels (along with residences, shopping, dining, etc.), to make it more attractive to the groups it already can accommodate but isn’t getting now because the larger shows have to go pretty far afield right now to house all their attendees. I think a new headquarters hotel would be a good use of the millions of dollars in public subsidies it would require, because I do believe in conventions as “financial engines” for cities. Then we can talk about further expanding the center (and hopefully simultaneously continuing development of hotels/shopping etc.).

Boston’s not alone in this fight by any means. Which do you think should come first, the convention center chicken or the hotel/area development egg? In cities like Boston that already have nice, relatively new convention centers but lack the facilities nearby to fully support conventions, I vote for the egg. Am I wrong? Tell me why.

Yes, I feel compelled to post a link to this story about people suing a Las Vegas hotel for $750,000 over bed bug bites, if only to be able to say that it bugs me on so many levels (sorry!).

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Economic Significance of Meetings to the U.S. Economy study, which “estimates that 205 million people attended nearly 1.8 million meetings in the U.S. in 2009. Those meetings generated $263 billion in direct spending, supported 1.7 million jobs, and contributed $106 billion to the gross domestic product.” While it took two years to complete, the study, which was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the CIC and funded by 14 of its constituent associations, gives us some much-needed fuel to fight the “AIG syndrome” and other perceptual woes.

But let’s not forget our hotel partners in all this. As Ed Watkins so rightly points out in this post, we should be lauding the effect every new hotel opening has on the local economy as well. As he says, after attending the grand opening of the JW Marriott in Indianapolis, “In an era when job creation is at a premium, the JW Marriott and its four sisters is a jobs machine. The JW used 2,000 construction workers in total, with 150 onsite daily throughout the project. And, perhaps more importantly, the property generated 700 full-time jobs for the city.” That’s something to celebrate.

Especially when it comes to marketing materials. Check out these reality checks on hotel marketing photos from Oyster.com — if your boss questions the need to do a site inspection, these photos ought to help you make your case that a meeting planner needs to be able to see to believe.

Forbes Travel Guide (formerly Mobil Travel Guide) has come out with its 2011 four- and five-star winners.

The five-star hotels are Island Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong, and Falling Rock at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Farmington, Pa. Congratulations also to the five-star spas: The Spa at The Grand Del Mar in San Diego, and The Spa at Mandarin Oriental, in Las Vegas.

Here’s a handy report from Hotel Online about the U.S. cities that have experienced the biggest hotel rate increases and decreases for October, as compared to October 2009. Omaha, Neb., dropped the most at 8 percent, followed by Richmond, Va. (-8%), Sacramento (-4%), Calgary, Alberta (-3%), and Las Vegas (-2%).

The biggest gains were seen in San Francisco (+23%), New Orleans (+22%), Miami (+21%), Niagara Falls, N.Y. (+17%), and Honolulu (+16%).