Investigating Venues

The Inspection Checklist

When it comes to the formal venue tour, experienced planners leave few stones unturned. Every planner has his or her own inspection priorities, but most evaluate these key factors during their site visits:

››› Meeting space. Once assured that a site has the right quantity of meeting space, planners typically use the site visit to verify that the floor plan specifications received from the request for proposal are accurate, ensuring that rooms can handle the variety of seating arrangements they need, and checking to see how centralized rooms are and whether there will be any problems getting supplies in and out.

Juntti checks the traffic flow between and inside meeting rooms “and how easy it is to move around the space, especially if we’ll have break tables set up in the back.” She also looks for things like rips in the carpet, scuff marks on walls, condition of tables and chairs, and other flaws that don’t show up in Web site photos or brochures.

Hoffman also examines hotel meeting space for lighting, sound capability, and the quality of chairs. “Spaces that have pre-existing programmable spotlights in the ceilings, for example, can save you the hassle of having to hang and remove lights yourself,” Hoffman says. He takes photos as he goes, and asks hotel staff for photos of ballrooms when they were “fully dressed” for previous meetings. He also checks the quality of the moveable walls that divide larger meeting spaces into smaller ones, to ensure they’re functional and not unsightly.

Few things escape Hoffman’s sharp eye, including a hotel’s supply of linens for banquet settings. “If we want to do certain colors, then we’ll know if we can use something already on hand or will have to bring it in ourselves,” he says.

Sometimes a walk-through will help planners catch things that weren’t mentioned by sales reps or were not prominent in other information supplied by a meeting site. Vallorie Toder, national sales manager for MetroConnections, an event management company in Minneapolis, received such a surprise when she discovered during an inspection of the San Diego Convention Center that the main ballroom featured a suspended floor, designed to mitigate damage from an earthquake. Because Toder had planned some events that involved dancing by both performers and a large audience, it meant she’d now have to suspend speakers, screens, projectors, and cameras from the ceiling rather than placing them on the floor. “The floor moved when you had a large number of people dancing on it, and the equipment could get damaged, or sound or image quality could be effected as a result,” Toder says.

››› Audio Visual Equipment. Nothing casts a pall over a meeting like a technology meltdown during a presentation, so it’s important to know not only the   audio-visual capabilities of a venue but the expertise level of its audio-visual support staff.

Juntti includes a detailed review of presentation-technology matters with a hotel’s AV manager as part of her inspections. She checks on the location of outlets and Internet connections, and ensures any on-site projectors will be compatible with her presenters’ laptops. “If we are doing a learning-lab–type set up with a lot of laptops, I also want to make sure I know who has the keys to the room and the process for securing it,” Juntti says.