Another horror show

Today must be meetings disaster day: First I hear about the Borat thing, and now there’s guys in HazMat suits crashing the entrance at the WinHEC conference, disrupting Bill Gates’ keynote presentation.

While I appreciate the Free Software Foundation’s anti-DRM stance (DRM stands for digital rights management–click here for more on what that’s all about), this must have been a nightmare for the meeting planners.

Lesson learned: Where was the security? Even if the inside is secured, attendees still can be harrassed as they enter the building. Especially with a high-profile speaker like Gates inside, one would think outside the box, in terms of security. Here’s an article with some security basics I bookmarked a while back.

Unfortunate names

It would never have occurred to me, but leave it to media guy Rex Hammock to point out the unfortunateness of this guide’s title (as he says, “If this confuses you, do a Google search of the acronym.”)

ROFL!

Lesson learned: Ask a 16-year-old if your association, meeting, whatever, acronym might mean something you didn’t intend in IM/chat-speak, or check out this list.

Something awful

Did you hear about Borat, a movie that’s coming out about a “Kazakhstani TV talking head Borat (Cohen)[who] is dispatched to the United States to report on the greatest country in the world. With a documentary crew in tow, Borat becomes more interested in locating and marrying Pamela Anderson”? Sounds harmless, until you read this report on Fox news:

But there are also some sequences that will defy censors, including one extended bit in which Borat and Azamat (sounds like HAZMAT), his sidekick — a thick eyebrowed sort of Sancho Panza with breasts larger than Pamela Anderson’s — wrestle nude in their hotel room.

The wildly explicit, freaky mayhem spills out in the hotel elevator and then down onto the stage of a conference of insurance underwriters.

The spectacle of Borat — a tall, lanky man, locked in hairy embrace with Azamat in front of several hundred straight-laced businessmen in blue blazers — may present to the MPAA its most confounding challenge ever about to rate a film for public consumption. The scenes are more disturbing than the end of “Hannibal.”

This is funny?? While the article goes on to say they got releases from everyone involved, they did so under false pretenses, saying they were from a TV station in Kazakhstan. But with a “near riot” caused when some well-meaning (I assume) insurance adjusters trying to break it up, I’d be calling my lawyer. Can you imagine this happening at one of your meetings? Just the thought makes me feel like I bit into an apple and saw half a wriggling worm. And the article calls the movie “a little gem”? Sounds downright hideous to me.

I guess the lesson must be to check credentials of anyone asking for a release, but who knows how this was done. It probably sounded pretty innocent before the fact.

Hat tip: MiForum Google group

WiFi spotting and yet more airline fees

Here’s some excellent scoopage from the MeCo (short for Meetings Community) Google group:

jwire.com is a cool site where you can find the WiFi hotspots all over the place–just plug in the city/state, and you’re good to go. Also works for airports. Excellent.

And this (I don’t know where the poster got this from or I’d link to the original site):

In an never ending quest to find new ways to separate the traveler from his/her money, airlines are now charging fees for such items as scuba equipment, surf boards, bicycles and other sporting gear. Regardless of weight, many airlines no longer include them as part of the luggage allowance and can impose anywhere from $25 to $150 to stow them on board. The problem is, the new policy is random, both by airline and within each airline. You may not be charged going, but you may be charged on your return, or vice-versa. So far, golf clubs and skis are exempt. Why? No one is saying but probably because the perception is that golfers and skiers are affluent business types who carry more weight (no pun intended) in the overall scheme of things.

The best advice they offer is to check curb-side, since “porters are less likely to impose fees than airline staffers.”

Calculating the cost of turnover

If any hoteliers are reading this, listen up because this one’s for you. We all know that turnover is a huge problem for the hospitality industry. And it becomes a huge problem for meeting planners when their CSM leaves just before their event, or the sales person disappears and no one seems to be able to remember just what was promised (I know, get it in the contract, but things happen sometimes). From talking with hoteliers, it seems like people just sort of accept that high turnover is the cost of doing business. But do we really know just how high a cost it can be?

I just ran across this report (pdf) from Cornell Center for Hospitality Research professors Timothy Hinkin and Bruce Tracey, and it’s an eye-opener. They developed a Web-based tool to measure the actual costs of front desk personnel turnover, and found that it comes to a whopping 30 percent of salary, which averages close to $5,900. In addition, said Hinkin, “Our participants said that co-workers lost 20 percent of their productivity for up to 16 days when a colleague left the front desk.” And it gets more costly as you move up the hotel food chain.

The researchers are looking to add more numbers to their database, and so have made their turnover cost calculator available for any hotelier to use for free. I’d urge you to participate, both to learn just how much turnover is draining from your budget for various positions, and to help build a knowledge base for the industry. You can access the tool here.

Support the students: Check out the UNLV Summit

The 2006 Las Vegas International Hospitality & Convention Summit, hosted by The William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration, University of Las Vegas, has what sounds like a good lineup. Particularly of interest this year is the EMBOK day (EMBOK stands for Event Management Body of Knowledge, a project Julia Rutherford Silvers, CSEP, has spearheaded.)

I also love that this meeting is planned by UNLV students studying meetings and events. It’s scheduled for June 2 to 4 in Las Vegas.

Book a meeting, plant a tree

I get tons of hotels promising me everything from an iPod to their first-born child if only I’d bring a meeting to their property, but this one really stands out from the crowd: Skamania Lodge in Oregon is sending live ponderosa pine trees to planners as part of its “Book a Meeting, Plant a Forest” campaign (good for meetings booked this summer). You not only get extras and good rates, they say; “100 trees will be planted in the company’s name to reforest areas in the West…It just started last month, but the campaign already has attracted two dozen meeting events,” according to this story in the Oregonian. I don’t have any business for them, but I do like the idea. I wish we saw more of the public-minded incentives, rather than those icky offers of personal points, vacations, and other things that smell more like bribery than incentives.

Is there no such thing as privacy anymore?

No, I’m not talking about Homeland Security and spying—we frequent hotel guests are a pretty demanding bunch when it comes to being free from unwanted visitors to our rooms, noise from the ice machine next door, and all that. Larry Mundy is always funny, but he outdoes himself in this editorial on the very topic of guest privacy in hotels. This is an especially hot button for me right now, seeing as I just got back from staying at an otherwise fabulous hotel whose housekeeping staff kept bursting in on me (or trying to—I learned pretty quick to throw the deadbolt even if I was just in the room for a few minutes). I especially liked this bit:

And hanging inside the lock is the Ultimate Weapon: the little plastic hang-tag that on one side says “Privacy, Please, We Are Newlyweds” and on the other side says “Please Make Up This Room, We Had Our First Fight And Threw Things.” The “Privacy, Please” tag will repel even the most determined housekeeper for days, until the adjoining guest who swears she heard gunshots begins to complain about odd smells. Newlyweds can be so volatile.

Sometimes, bending the rules just makes sense

We all have refund policies for our meetings. We all like to stick by them, for obvious reasons. But after reading this post on Jupiter Research, where Diane Clarkson talks about how a rigid airline rebooking policy caused her to take her business elsewhere, and compares it with an experience with Expedia working with a hotel to get her get a cancellation fee waived, I have to admit that sometimes it makes more sense (and cents!) to bend the rules every now and then.

Feeling insecure?

Terri Hardin over at MISoapbox asks if anyone’s heard any jokes about Homeland Security lately. Well, Terri, not exactly. But I did find this site to be pretty funny. Called “The National Scrutiny Agency” and topped with a quasi-official-looking logo, it asks readers to send in their burning questions. Like:

Q: Where’s Waldo?
A: We’re still looking, but you can trust that we’re following up on many excellent leads.
Q: Where did I leave my keys?
A: Inside pocket of your gray jacket (it’s hanging in the front closet).

It won’t help with all the travel restrictions and requirements that make participants sometimes loathe to fly to meetings, but it gave me a laugh, anyway.
What’s not so funny is this article in Wired:

Newly released government documents show that even having a high-level security clearance won’t keep you off the Transportation Security Administration’s Kafkaesque terrorist watch list, where you’ll suffer missed flights and bureaucratic nightmares.

According to logs from the TSA’s call center from late 2004 — which black out the names of individuals to protect their privacy — the watch list has snagged:

• A State Department diplomat who protested that “I fly 100,00 miles a year and am tired of getting hassled at Dulles airport — and airports worldwide — because my name apparently closely resembles that of a terrorist suspect.”
• A person with an Energy Department security clearance.
• An 82-year-old veteran who says he’s never even had a traffic ticket.
• A technical director at a science and technology company who has been working with the Pentagon on chemical and biological weapons defense.
• A U.S. Navy officer who has been enlisted since 1984.
• A high-ranking government employee with a better-than-top-secret clearance who is also a U.S. Army Reserve major.
• A federal employee traveling on government business who says the watch list matching “has resulted in ridiculous delays at the airports, despite my travel order, federal ID and even my federal passport.”
• A high-level civil servant at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
• An active-duty Army officer who had served four combat tours (including one in Afghanistan) and who holds a top-secret clearance.
• A retired U.S. Army officer and antiterrorism/force-protection officer with expertise on weapons of mass destruction who was snared when he was put back on active-duty status while flying on a ticket paid for by the Army.
• A former Pentagon employee and current security-cleared U.S. Postal Service contractor.

Also held up was a Continental Airlines flight-crew member traveling as a passenger, who complained to TSA, “If I am safe enough to work on a plane then I should be fine to be a passenger sleeping.”