Investigating Venues

Meeting planners are the matchmakers of the corporate world, tasked with pairing often-idiosyncratic meetings or events with hotel or convention center sites that offer just the right combination of ambiance, meeting space, and customer service. And like their counterparts in the world of romance, these matchmakers understand one of the surest formulas for disaster is the blind date, which is why personally inspecting prospective event sites is one of the most vital parts of their jobs.

While planners all have their own unique systems for conducting inspections, most are guided by the same credo in ensuring that a venue’s marketing claims match up to reality: trust but verify.

On-Site Scrutiny

Once planners have determined the size, budget, and purpose of an event—be it informational, educational, or celebratory—and narrowed the field of site candidates through preliminary research, they’re ready for the inspection. Before making formal appointments to inspect properties, many planners try to assess a venue on the sly, hoping to pick up valuable clues while incognito.

Vicki Juntti, a trade show and event manager for Sagebrush Corporation, a Minneapolis company that provides products to public schools, usually spends a night at a hotel she’s considering for multiple-day sales or incentive meetings. “That’s when you find out if there’s no hot water in the morning, the room service is bad, or you don’t get the promised wake-up call on time,” Juntti says. She can also see how effectively hotel staff responds to service complaints.

Other planners sit in a hotel lobby during busy times to watch how the front desk interacts with customers. “If there is going to be an Achilles’ heel with a hotel, it’s usually the front desk,” says Dennis Hoffman, vice president of meeting services for Equinox Creative, an event management company in Minneapolis. “That’s because it’s usually the area with highest [staff] turnover.”