2 Ways To Wow At A Trade Show While Keeping Your CFO Happy

(1)   Ask A Friend–People are often willing to lend you tradeshow supplies they aren’t using at the time. Chances are, they could use the extra space in the office. Make sure you consider other avenues as well. We were able to secure an unbelievable deal on our hotel suite just by talking to our hotel partners.

(2)   Stand Out, Have Fun – We brought a bed to our tradeshow. Yes, a bed. Based on our company core values, namely Make It Fun, we chose the fun concept and ran with it. As it was out first show we were hesitant straying from the norm but the feedback was fantastic. Many people commented on the originality of our booth, it generated talk and brought us a large amount of traffic. This curiosity proved to be a great conversation starter in person and online. 

Results from the Unconvention

The results are in from the 2011 Unconvention and they are great! The attendees really enjoyed the discussions and information sessions. Here are some of the things they loved about the Unconvention:

“Tips & tools to develop hotel relationships, the use of Meetingmax as a sales tool, best practices for post event reconciliation, attempting to reduce error and questions, the entire conference!”

“Networking, Networking, Networking! Learning how others use the system's revenue generation.”

“I love meeting fellow users face-to-face. It will make it so much easier to give them a call if I have a question on how they handle a certain MMX issue. And it's so nice meeting others that can completely relate to the complexities I face in the system. Experiencing Vancouver "Meetingmax Style" is so much fun and I feel lucky to have that opportunity." 

"You all do a great job in making the event unique, memorable, and beneficial."

"This was such an enjoyable event! Thank you so much. I have no improvements!"

Meetingmax would like to thank all the attendees for making this year's event such a success.

Visit Detroit Revs Up with Meetingmax

The Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (Visit Detroit) announced today the signing of an agreement with Meetingmax Systems. Visit Detroit will now be able to offer meeting planners a simple tool to manage hotel room bookings for large-scale events held in the city.

“Offering housing support is essential in attracting conventions and groups to The D,” said John Francis, Manager, Sports and Destination Support, Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau. “While we have used a number of housing products in the past, we hadn’t found a vendor that could meet all of our needs. Meetingmax’s system is the best I have seen - it is easy to use and extremely cost-effective.”

Visit Detroit was looking for a system that could help meeting planners manage blocks of hotel rooms in the region’s 250 hotels. Instead of having to use each hotel’s system to track bookings, a meeting planner can secure blocks of housing through Visit Detroit and then manage their bookings through one central portal. Conference attendees are sent a link which allows them to explore participating hotels and book their own rooms.

“For a meeting planner, housing is the single largest headache and is often a deal breaker when selecting a destination,” says Jeff Duncan, COO, Meetingmax Systems. “Our system offers hotels, planners, and CVBs a powerful and customizable tool that makes it easy to manage their inventory.”

One of Visit Detroit’s challenges lay in the fact that it didn’t have a consistent annual volume of housing reservations. Some years it had a large number of conventions requiring the service, while other years it did not. While other products require CVBs to meet a minimum number of room bookings through the system, Meetingmax has no set minimums.

“With Meetingmax, we are only paying for the services that we use,” continued Francis. “Since we don’t pass on the fees to our member hotels, other products just didn’t justify the costs.”

Third Annual Meetingmax Unconvention Agenda Released Today

We are very excited that the Third Annual Meetingmax UNconvention is just around the corner. We hope it will be as fun to attend as it was to plan. If you are still on the fence we dare you to review the agenda and then tell us you aren’t coming!

We also wanted to share a note we received from one of your fellow Meetingmax users about the program coming up:

“When the York County CVB implemented a housing bureau in 2006, we felt we had to "invent the wheel" for housing procedures and documents.  If we had access to an event like the Meetingmax UNconvention, it would have saved an untold amount of time, resources and challenges. 

I cannot express how excited I am to have the opportunity to spend 2 full days with other Meetingmax users in April.  Organizations and destinations should take advantage of this opportunity.  Housing can be a challenging business, housing providers should take every chance to learn from those that went before them.

I look forward to seeing you in Vancouver!”

-Christina Smith, Services Manager, York County Convention and Visitors Bureau

To save you from a 12 page document, the educational sessions on the attached agenda are simply numbered #1 to #10. You will be provided with an outline of what sessions are taking place at what times in your arrival kit at the airport.

Meetingmax Unconvention Session Annouced: "Overcoming Obstacles"

Dear Meetingmax User,

We are drawing closer to this year’s user conference and we are looking forward to welcoming many of you to Vancouver on April 27, 28 &29. We wanted to take an opportunity to announce another of our user-led sessions. A perfect mix of peer learning and expert teaching will prepare you to take your housing bureau to new heights this year. Don’t miss this year’s event! Registration can be completed at: www.eplyevents.com/MMXUNCONVENTION2011

Session Announcement:

Join Janine Wachter, Director of Convention Services at the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau, as she facilitates a working and interactive lunch session focusing on allowing your peers to help solve problems you face at your destination. Whether it is lack of hotel buy-in, issues with post event reconciliation, problems with planners just not ‘getting it’, problems with marketing the system due to severe rate sensitivity or any other issues you or your destination faces with housing, this will be a forum to get solutions from your peers. Each group will take real life issues submitted by you and work to solve them, bringing back plausible solutions to discuss as a large group. The power of accessing ideas and perspective from your peer group is invaluable. It is true that you can’t always see the forest through the trees! Join us for this fun and informative session.

As always, should you have any questions or concerns, please just let us know. We look forward too seeing you next month!