CVBs and DMCs are actively stretching the value they can deliver to an event’s bottom line.

The U.S. Naval Base dominates San Diego Bay. Even so, when an event planner for IBM asked Madelyn Marusa, DMCP, whether she could get nine back-to-back incentive conventions on base a few years ago, Marusa looked at her and thought, “She must be kidding.”

“For the longest time, we tried to hide the fact that San Diego was a military town,” said Marusa, vice president of industry relations at PRA Destination Management. “And now IBM wants the military.”

Energized, Marusa was intent on delivering. A little hook here and a bit more crook there—or as she delicately put it, “we used the resources and connections that it took”—and she was on base, visiting “anything along the water that people could see.”

“I thought of the movie Top Gun, and the idea of a movie-themed event hit me.”

And off she went, searching for the Officer’s Club.

If first impressions counted for anything, our story would end there. The club was in disrepair, certainly not up to convention standards. Undaunted and heady with visions of Tom Cruise and F-14A Tomcats, Marusa turned to the manager.

“What can you do for me if I bring you, like, 19 luncheons?” she asked.

Marusa soon found herself meeting with the base command, trying to convince them that the luncheons wouldn’t cost the taxpayers a dime, that her firm would work with any guidelines and that the events would be successful.

“Now we promote events in both the Officer’s Club and flight hangers at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar,” she said. “And the Officer’s Club has new paint, new rooms, new furniture and the officers enjoy the fruits of the San Diego convention market.”

Marusa’s story is representative of what enterprising DMCs and CVBs can do. While she and other DMCs focus on the logistics of meeting client needs, the CVBs focus on the big picture: marketing and promotion. Both look for forward-thinking ways to add value to what meeting and event planners do.

Big Pictures

As list curators of hotels, restaurants and attractions that make up a destination city and of the photos and videos that act as a siren call to potential visitors, CVBs sit atop every meeting planner’s contact list. Along Utah’s Wasatch Front, the curator is Visit Salt Lake, the city’s convention bureau. Scott Beck, president and CEO, says the curator function is the “very best value” his organization offers to meeting and event planners.

“We are knowledgeable about the amenities and attractions our city offers, but the real value is that there’s no cost,” Beck said. “We aggregate the information and give it to planners.”

Giving hardly describes what Visit Salt Lake does. What Beck calls “third-screen technology” is more accurate. First screen, he explains, refers to your television; second screen to your computer; third screen to that mobile device in your hand. 

Visit Salt Lake has invested heavily in third-screen technology, making it possible for the convention bureau to aggregate comprehensive information about the city and push it out to meeting and event delegates in bite-sized portions based on criteria relevant to them—before, during and after the event.

“If it’s a city-wide event, we can aggregate information on that basis. If it’s county-wide, we can aggregate everything from the snow report at ski resorts up the canyons and in Park City to the hours of the Family History Library downtown,” he said. “We can even condense it to material relevant in terms of proximity and demand to only a small group at a single hotel.”

The San Diego CVB takes a different approach, according to Margie Sitton, senior vice president of sales.

“We’re one of only three bureaus—including those in Boston and Hawaii—that don’t handle citywides,” Sitton said. “We’re not trying to fill the convention center. We focus strictly on single-hotel leads.”

With that focus in mind, Sitton’s team of 24 salespeople cover the airfare to bring many meeting planners to San Diego for site inspections and ensures their time is well spent.

“We’ve created a site inspection team to take care of them,” she explained. “We schedule the hotel visits, we meet the planner at the airport, we hold the hotels accountable. We actually say, ‘This is what the customer wants to see.’ Don’t show them anything they don’t want to see. Don’t drag it out. Stay on schedule.”

And she means it. At the end of each site visit, she asks customers to evaluate the hotel’s performance based on multiple criteria.

“The efficiency of the site, how interested the hotel was in getting their business, whether the hotel had actually read the customer’s RFP, those sorts of things,” Sitton said. “We hold the hotel’s feet to the fire.”

Additionally, the San Diego CVB created iLead, a proprietary program that allows hotels to upload proposals for a particular customer, proposals loaded with data, photos and other information specific to each customer’s needs. As a proposal is uploaded, the customer receives an email notification. Following a link supplied by the CVB, the customer can go online to download all the proposals into an Excel spreadsheet for easy sorting.

“Our customers love it,” Sitton said. “One meeting planner called just to say she was online, watching the proposals roll in.”

Specific Logistics

Say your work is garbage. No, you don’t hate your work; you’re in waste management. And say you’re travelling to New York and want to see something new and different, something that doesn’t involve Broadway or the Yankees. Kitt Garrett, founder and CEO of Discover New York, caters to people like that, whether they’re visiting the city as an individual or as part of a group.

“There are certain DMCs that can easily move 25,000 people through the city. Load them onto buses and move bodies,” Garrett said. “What we’re trying to do is move their souls and minds in a way that causes them to say, ‘Ah-ha! Now I understand why that happens.’”

Take that guy in waste management. He came to Garrett through a travel agent, so she asked, “What does he do?”

“He’s an engineer,” the travel agent responded.

“What kind of engineer?” Garrett asked, digging a little deeper.

The agent checked and called Garrett back.

“He’s in waste management.”

Garrett was beside herself.

“Oh, my gosh! How cool is that! New York has the Rolls Royce, the Versailles of waste management sitting on the Hudson River, and we can show it to him,” she said.

The guy was thrilled. Turns out he had written his master’s thesis on The Eggs, the local nickname for the facility.

Whether it’s a trip to a waste-management facility or a visit backstage at a Broadway musical, a single individual or the board of directors of a Fortune 500 company, Garrett’s firm seeks to match people with events and experiences, opportunities people can’t buy on their own. Appropriately, she refers to these experiences as Open Access Tours.

“Why should everybody go on an incentive trip and do the same thing, when I can build an incentive where people get to do what’s important to them,” she said. “That’s a real incentive.” 

Event planners for large groups are also thrilled with Garrett’s efforts, possibly because she approaches meetings from a different perspective.

“The concept is, you will be doing something other than sleeping, so don’t worry about the hotel first,” she said. “Figure out what you’re going to do all day, then book the hotel. Event planners typically do the reverse and end up spending much more on transportation.”

For Garrett, who has been named a Condé Nast Traveler destination specialist seven years running, that makes no sense. She claims that once she explains her approach to meeting planners, they agree. In one case, a planner called for help in arranging a dinner and theater outing for an incoming group. The planner had already picked out a hotel on the East Side and was waiting to sign the contract.

“‘Why are you on the East Side?’” I asked. “‘Oh, I got a great rate,’ she said.”

Garrett explained how the planner could save a bunch on transportation if she booked a hotel on the West Side, how everybody then could walk to dinner and to the theater, how they could have a much nicer dinner because of the transportation savings. Then she gave the planner contacts for a hotel on the West Side.

“She ended up moving to that hotel and was able to add a tour to the package because she had saved so much money,” Garrett said.

On the Receiving End

Because of ideas like these, Julie Benson, director of planning and buying at Aimia (formerly Carlson Marketing) seeks out CVBs and DMCs.

“CVBs have really stepped up to the plate [in recent years],” Benson said. “They’re good at putting together strategic packages to help us promote their areas, and they’ve really helped us narrow our search when we ask for help. [And DMCs are] our experts in that location, our feet on the street. We look to them for things that individuals can’t buy—things exclusive to the DMC’s area.”

Things such as private dinners at the Ancestral Temple of the Forbidden City in Beijing; a feast in Germany’s Black Forest, with a long dinner table in a vineyard setting; and an exclusive street fair on the shores of Lake Michigan, with adult-sized swing sets, a tattoo station and a celebrity band.

“We look to them for something new and innovative,” Benson said—something top gun. One+

TAGS: business of meetings , CVBs , DMCs , One+ December 2011