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. 

Book Review: How To Win At The Sport Of Business By Mark Cuban

Meetingmax’s March book of the month was How to Win at the Sport of Business by Mark Cuban.

Keeping in line with our core value of Doing More with Less Meetingmax selected this book as Grasshopper was offering a complimentary copy to their best customers.

This book is a collection of blog posts about Cuban’s life, outlining his failures and success in both his personal and business life. As Cuban states “If I can do it, you can do it”; he offers a realistic outlook on how to succeed in the business world through perseverance and dedication.

The following are a few key takeaways the Meetingmax staff got from the book:

• You only need one win to succeed. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail, it will only bring you closer to your win.

• Read as much as you can. Cuban reads a minimum of three hours per day. Everything you read can give you ideas for your business so it is worth the time investment.

• Just because you win the battle doesn’t mean you have won the war, the sport of business is 24/7/365- we are always playing.

Overall Meetingmax gave this book a rating of 8.4/10 on a scale where 1 equals a book with little value one would not wish to read again, and 10 equals a fantastic book with the ability to grow an individual personally, professionally or both.

Although it was a fantastic read, one limitation was that the book was only available through a Kindle or PDF download.

If you are interested in buying this book you can do so here.

Book Review: Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

Meetingmax’s February book of the month was Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar.

Ben-Shahar teaches that the key to being ‘Happier’ is to find activities that provide us both present and future happiness; ultimately to live for today and for tomorrow. He teaches us to incorporate pleasure (present benefit) and meaning (future benefit) into ones life.

Below are a few of the different issues covered in the book:

Happiness is the ultimate currency. Most people mistake money as the ultimate currency when in fact we seek money so we may buy items or experiences which we believe will bring us happiness.

There are four basic archetypes of happiness:

1. Rat Racer: The rat racer is constantly chasing happiness. They believe that sacrificing their own happiness in the present will result in future happiness.
2. Hedonist: The hedonist lives for present happiness without care for future gain.
3. Nihilist: The nihilist has given up on happiness. They don’t believe they can find it in the present or the future.
4. Happiness: Happiness requires that one live both for today and tomorrow, present and future benefit.

Happiness and pleasure are not the same thing. Pleasure is the experience of present gain; meaning comes from having a sense of purpose from the future benefit of our actions. Experiencing pleasure will not bring you happiness. You need to derive both present (pleasure) and future benefit (meaning) to be truly happy.

Gratitude is of utmost importance. Shahar suggests keeping a gratitude journal and writing down five things each day that you are grateful for.

Some examples from the Meetingmax staff on activities that bring them happiness are:

• Running
• Learning new languages
• Working on creative projects
• Computer programming (luckily from our IT guy!)
• Playing sports
• Training for a triathlon
• Running the newspaper in college

The Meetingmax team highly recommends Happier. Overall it scored an 8.9/10 on a scale where 1 equals a book with little value one would not wish to read again and 10 equals a fantastic book with the ability to grow an individual personally, professionally or both.

For more from Ben-Shahar, check out this article where he answers the following questions. 

1. What can people do each day to be happier? 
2. How can we cultivate gratitude? 
3. What happiness techniques are particularly important in today’s world?

Meetingmax Culture - Pinterest

Our company culture stems from our six core values... 

          1) Create Success 

          2) Do More With Less 

          3) Make It Fun 

          4) Exceed Expectations 

          5) Nurture All Relationships

          6) Continually Grow 

Make It Fun - Barista Mondays! MMX employees alternate playing the barista on Monday mornings, when coffee is most needed :) 

Continually Grow - Read as often as you can. As a team we read one new book per month with the intention that it will grow us either personally or professionally.

Make It Fun - Slipper Optional Policy. Four Seasons Resort & Hotel slippers provided to all staff and guests of the office. 

Make It Fun - Alternating Staff iPod Days

Make It Fun - Martini Fridays

Make It Fun - Out of the box day. Occasionally we take our laptops and work in a new environment outside of the office for the day. Hopefully this beach shot is a predictor of our next destination!

Continually Grow - The MMX team is currently training for the 2012 Vancouver Sun Run.

Create Success - Each employee has their own personal "Vision Board" in the office.

Go Green with Meetingmax: Online Reservation System Helps To Reduce The Environmental Impact Of Your Events.

The February issue of SportsEvents Magazine ran a special feature titled Walk the Talk – Event Planners Stand Up For Green Events. Meetingmax Systems user, Krista Flanagan of Centurion Cycling, shared the many ways in which she is making her events green, including using our online lodging program.

Krista uses her Meetingmax online reservation system to minimize paper use associated with the reservation process. With previous events that she worked with, she would print off 2,000 hotel request forms so that attendees could put in their requests for rooms for the next year's event. They would then fax/mail forms back and forth to the hotels and event organizer. And finally they would print off confirmations and mail them to all the guests. As this is now all done online within the system by registrants themselves, they save a considerable amount of paper and the emissions associated with mailing.

Krista also negotiates hotel room blocks at hotels that are closest to the venue helping to reduce carbon emissions associated with travel to and from the event venue.

Additionally the Meetingmax System allows planners to save all registrant and hotel information from past events in the system, as well as the personal records of attendees. With this information stored safely in the system there is no requirement to print off reports.

For more ideas on how to make your events green check out the full article above.

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. 

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