Visit Vancouver USA and Visit Valley Forge Select Meetingmax to Manage Their Event Accommodation Needs

We are delighted to welcome our newest clients, Visit Vancouver USA and Visit Valley Forge, to the Meetingmax team! Both destinations will use our online housing software to manage accommodations for events inside their respective cities.

Visit Vancouver USA is an economic development organization responsible for competitively marketing Vancouver Washington and the surrounding area as a destination for meetings, conventions, sporting events, group tours, and leisure travelers. Their mission is to promote Vancouver and Clark County and increase convention and visitor business as well as leisure travel to the area. 

 The Valley Forge Convention & Visitors Bureau is a private, non-profit membership sales and marketing organization which aggressively promotes the Valley Forge area and Montgomery County in Pennsylvania as a convention site and leisure visitor destination by promoting patronage of its member hotels, restaurants, attractions and services. The Bureau represents more than 300 member businesses throughout Southern Pennsylvania.

Both clients will use our online housing reservation system to manage group housing for their events. The Meetingmax system offers the Convention Bureaus, their hotels and their meeting planners a powerful and customizable tool that makes it simple to manage hotel room inventory.  Beyond this, our software will provide extensive reporting and tracking of key event metrics that help demonstrate these CVB’s worth, such as total number of guests in the city and total room spend per event. Both clients will also benefit from our newly developed Simpleview CRM integration. 

About Meetingmax:

Meetingmax Systems provides the travel industry with the most flexible online housing reservation system. Initially developed to meet the needs of Meetingmax’s meeting and event planning arm, the system provides convention and visitor bureaus, event planners, and organizations with a simple yet powerful means to manage conference and event room bookings. The company is based in Vancouver, BC and can be found online at www.meetingmaxsystems.com. 

Welcome Omaha

We want to welcome the Omaha Convention and Visitors Bureau to Meetingmax.

Lindsey Creath, Convention Services Manager at the Omaha CVB told us that they were impressed at how flexible and user friendly our software is. 

“With Meetingmax we will be able to efficiently offer planners an easy way to manage their housing,” Creath said. “It will allow us to offer an additional service and remain a competitive destination. Also, we don’t have to commit to minimum volumes, but we still get a great system to use!”

The CVB has used other systems in the past but found that our system was compatible for both convention groups and team events. Meetingmax’s sub block feature will make the lives of team administrators much easier.  They can now reserve a room block and have athletes register and pay for their room themselves within that block.

We look forward to working together!

For anyone looking for a venue in the Midwest, be sure to check out visitomaha.com

The 2012 Meetingmax Unconvention - Why You Should Attend

Meetingmax's Unconvention is an industry-best learning event for any CVB, association, corporation, sporting organization or meeting planner using, or looking to dive into, online housing. 

Success in housing = a perfect blend of art & science. In the business of housing come learn to paint like Picasso and compute like Einstien.

• An effective mix of peer to peer sharing and tactical expert led learning.
• For organizations and destinations that want to succeed at housing, this event has become a “must attend.”
• You will walk out with the tools you need to establish, increase or refine your housing services.

Full agenda to be released soon; potential sessions include:

• Social Media From The Ground Up – How To Promote Your Events
• System Revenue Generators – Getting The Most From Your System
• Post Event Reconciliation – Best Practices For Closing Your Events

>>>Register Today!<<<

Please contact Kelly Mackay at kelly@meetingmax.cc with any questions.

Are you Pinterested yet?

Pinterest just recently came onto my radar about a month ago. Since then it seems that not a day passes when I don’t hear about this new social media site. Reading a few articles today, it got me thinking…. are you using Pinterest to showcase your destination?

When I think of my favourite places in the world I instantly envision the beautiful scenery. When looking for new vacation destinations it’s most often photos that have me thinking, I need to go there and see that in real life. Pinterest is such a great tool to show off your city!

For those who have not had a chance to check out the site yet, Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. 

A recent article in the Entrepreneur states that Pinterest “registered more than 7 million unique visitors in December, up from 1.6 million in September. And it's driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.”

Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0 Consulting recently sat down with the Interactive Marketing Strategist for Experience Columbus, Joe Vargo, and asked him 5 questions on how he is using Pinterest to promote his destination. 

(Read the full article here)

Vargo describes Pinterest as “a good blend of the visual emphasis of YouTube and Flickr combined with the social aspects of Facebook and Twitter” that “allows destinations to show their complex personalities – something that’s nearly impossible to write into web copy.”

He states that people are using Pinterest to share their aspirations, and “it’s really the best form of social marketing when someone takes an image of your destination and adds it to their aspirational life (endorsing the destination to their followers.)”

If you are active on Pinterest please share your handle with us so we can follow your picture updates.