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“One of the things they (event planners) really have to do is listen,” explained Jennifer Adams Aldrich, who teaches a course in trade show and exposition management at Johnson & Wales University. “They love to sit and tell you what’s important to their members (and) also what went wrong at the last location.”
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Just a few of the issues that come up regularly are: transportation from the airport, VIP treatment for certain attendees, decorations, food, hotel rooms, assigning booth spaces, spouse and family events.
Some groups have “very specialized needs,” she added.
For instance, someone organizing an event for Little People of America, which is an association for people with dwarfism, would need a plan for restroom facilities, “since a handicapped toilet isn’t going to help (members) at all, because it’s higher.”
Aldrich recently participated in planning for the Community Transportation Association of America meeting in Albuquerque. Association members, some who head up public transit agencies, required that meeting room stages be equipped with wheelchair lifts and that programs be available in Braille and on audio tape.
And, she asked, “What are you going to do if the American Kennel Club wants to use your center?” Organizers must be prepared to deal with the inevitable puddles and messes that accompany a dog show.
Then there’s the need to design events that will draw people into the exhibit halls, and making sure all exhibitors play fair and only hand out promotional materials from their booths, she added.
“If things outside the showroom floor are more exciting than what’s going on the showroom floor you’re going to have exhibitors, who feel like they spent money for nothing,” Aldrich said.
Last year, she helped organize a conference here for the 2,000 member Council of Hotel Restaurant Institutional Education. Johnson & Wales planners came up with a beach theme and decorated the exhibit hall with lifeguard chairs and installed a limbo pit.
Planning usually starts well ahead of time, with groups needing hotel rooms starting several years ahead, and major events, such as the Democratic or Republican national conventions being booked 10 to 15 years ahead.
Nicholas Langella, general manager of the Rhode Island Convention Center, said his staff starts planning about 120 days before an event.
“On a big show it’s not uncommon for me to send my staff out to see the show (in another city),” Langella added.
In 1996, for instance the convention center was the site of a plastics convention, which required displaying machinery, some of which weighed “in excess of 31,000 pounds,” he said. So staff planners attended the convention somewhere else to see how it was put together.
“We needed to get a bird’s eye view of the equipment,” Langella explained.
And in trying to lure business, no request is too big for Langella.
“We get all kinds of requests. Really, ‘no’ is not in our repertoire,” he said.
For instance, the convention center has hosted youth soccer tournaments in the exhibition hall and turns 100,000 square feet of floor space into a garden for the annual flower show.
Aldrich, of Johnson & Wales, said: “If you’re willing to pay for it, you can have anything you want; we’d be willing to cover the convention center floor with sand for you.”
But the organizer’s job still isn’t over once the event starts, because they must be ready to do trouble shooting, Aldrich added.
Planners at Newport Hospitality, Inc., have lots of experience trying to accommodate clients and handling last minute details.
Recently they had a client that wanted to hold a cigar reception for 350 people, but since none of Newport’s historic mansions allow smoking, the hospitality company turned to the managers of another venue. They had a good rapport with them, and were able to arrange a cigar reception on an outdoor porch, Sheryl Spanos, president of Newport Hospitality explained.
This past summer, after five years of planning for a 1,200 person Rolls Royce Club convention, Spanos said they scrambled to help arrange for members to use hotel hoses to wash their cars. Nobody had realized until the event began that members would want to wash their cars, before entering them in a judged competition at Hammersmith Farm, she explained.
Spanos said: “It’s like putting together a big puzzle, and every piece needs to be a perfect match. If you hire the wrong band, or wrong caterer, or use the wrong venue, if something is amiss in your puzzle you could have a disaster event.”
But mostly, she said, events come off seamlessly.
“In all honesty most of them do, but it’s not by luck, it’s by planning and planning.”
