Hotel

Advantage:
- The second most common place for a meeting
- Their meeting spaces vary widely in size and quality
- Within the past few years, there has been a surge in the expansion of hotel meeting
space. Hotels with over 100,000 square feet of meeting space are no longer rare.
- Many privately funded hotels such as Marina Bay Sands, Wilson President or
Mandalay Bay are encroaching on the convention venue domains previously
dominated by government-funded convention center facilities.
- Hotels generally provide a variety of meeting spaces.
- many hotels have beautiful outdoor venues to support social and “networking”
functions. Pools, patios, atriums, and gardens can all be used as meeting locations
- In addition to utilizing outdoor venues, the use of prefunction space such as corridors
or lobbies adjacent to meeting rooms may provide a location for ancillary event needs.
Refreshment breaks, registration desks, and Internet cafes may be situated in these
prefunction areas to provide necessary services without compromising valuable
meeting rooms
Disadvantage:
- For most hotels meetings are rarely their primary business. This single financial fact
of life overshadows all other aspects of any negotiation between a meeting planner
and a hotel.
- The interest paid on the investment capital needed to build the hotel and the staff and
materials to clean, maintain, and operate the meeting rooms are some of the most
significant costs related to meeting space. These costs must be funded from
somewhere. Most often these costs are covered by requiring a meeting to commit to
using a minimum number of sleeping rooms for a minimum number of nights.
- Given the popularity of Internet travel booking sites, many planners are realizing that
their delegates are finding cheaper rates at the same hotels as the meeting by booking
outside the contracted room block. These rooms often wind up not being counted as
related to the meeting.
- Seasonality and fluctuating occupancy levels can have a significant impact on the
cost of using a facility. A hotel with a severe seasonal variation can have an off-season
price that is as little as half of its peak-season price. A common misconception among
meeting delegates is that the incredibly cheap rate that they pay to use an exclusive
resort is due to their planner’s negotiating prowess, when it is more likely that the
great rate is because of the planner’s choice of a venue with extreme seasonal
variations.
- Depending on the size and scope of an event, it may take anywhere from a few hours
to a week to set up (or tear down) the physical aspect of an event, particularly if there
is an exhibition component. This time is essentially a lost opportunity for the hotel
because rather than booking another group, which could generate money, the space is
unavailable. Hotels may charge a rental fee for the space itself to gain back some of
that lost revenue, but there is no opportunity to make additional profit through catering
or other revenue centers.
the example about hotel:

Marina Bay Sands

Beau-Rivage Palace (Lausanne,

Switzerland)
Convention centers
Advantage:
- convention centers are huge. Convention centers are designed to handle larger events
than could be supported in a hotel.
- convention center lobbies are designed to facilitate the uninterrupted flow of several
thousand delegates.
- It would not be unusual for the prefunction spaces in a convention center to be larger
than the breakout rooms attached to them, unlike a typical hotel where the prefunction
spaces tend to be smaller.
- convention centers have rooms with built-in stage and even full-sized theaters, a
characteristic relatively uncommon in hotels.
- In newly constructed convention centers, the green movement is at the forefront.
Ceilings are being made of transparent materials and windows are being included to
let natural sunlight come in, thus reducing costs of lighting. Thermal heat pumps are
being installed to reduce heating costs. Run of water and “brown water” is being
recycled and used for irrigation…
- a convention center is more likely to publish all its rate information either in print or
on a Web site than is any other type of meeting facility. It is possible to go through
many convention centers’ documentation and know before talking to a salesperson
what that event is likely to cost.
- most convention centers are owned by government entities. The intent of the
government that built the building is that the facility be an economic driver for the
whole community. Therefore, the facility can take events that benefit the community
as a whole with less concern for driving the demand for sleeping room nights in the
surrounding hotels.
Disadvantage:
- Unlike hotels, convention centers generally do not have spas or swimming pools,
exercise rooms, or saunas, restaurants or bars.
- While a hotel is open around the clock, convention centers can, and do, lock the
doors at night and the staff goes home when nothing is scheduled
- In a hotel, someone is on duty at all times, whereas if someone is required to be
available at odd hours in a convention center, that person must be scheduled in
advance.
- Given the political climate in which most convention centers operate, combined with
the size and scope of the events they support, they tend to be bureaucratic and
inflexible.
- Negotiations can take longer than in a hotel
Ex:
Melbourne Convention Centrer (Melbourne, Australia)

Vancouver Convention Centre (Vancouver, Canada)

Conference Centers
Advantage:
- Much of the focus of the education of meeting planners has focused on the larger
meeting.
- conference centers are well-appointed facilities specifically designed to enhance
classroom-style learning.
- The Convention Industry Council defines a conference center as a facility that
provides a dedicated environment for events, especially small events.
- One of the major differences concerns the conference centers’ focus on teaching and
learning instead of on elegant parties. This tends to translate into better furniture and a
greater tendency toward permanently installed work surfaces as well as permanently
installed projection and audio systems
- Many conference centers, whether resident or nonresident, employ a pricing strategy
called the complete meeting package, which essentially means that whatever the
facility owns, the planner may use at no additional charge. For the planner, this is a
flexible way to work.
- Suburban and rural conference centers routinely feature highquality golf courses,
while the more urban centers would link to cultural and sporting activities located in
the city centers. Some of the more rural facilities offer horseback riding or outdoor
activities like hiking or skiing in season.
- Conference centers using the complete meeting package tend to be entirely self-
contained. If outside vendors are used, they will likely be transparent to the planner.
Disavantage:
- conference centers are small
- Some conference centers are in remote locations. Some of the nonresident centers
are part of large corporate office complexes and are offered to the public only when
the parent company is not using the facility
- Like hotels, corporations generally own conference centers, although some are
closely held family businesses. They are not government entities. Therefore, they
operate more like hotels than like convention centers except that their meeting spaces
are focused almost exclusively on classroom-style education. Conference centers can
also have seasonal patterns much like hotels.
- It is not unusual for a conference center to charge a planner a fixed price for up to a
certain number of delegates. If some of the delegates do not come to the event, the
planner is still responsible for the full amount of the contract. This fee is not based on
the ability of the facility to resell the rooms. It is based on 100% of the negotiated
facility fee regardless how much of the facility is used.
The National Conference Center (Leesburg, Virginia,USA)