Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to Extra, Extra!, PCMA Convene's semi-regular weekly news supplement.  Lately it's been more semi than regular, and for that we apologize — the Convene editorial staff have been busy putting together our November and December issues, always the biggest of the year, in addition to helping plan our first-ever Convene Forum, in Cancun next week.

But enough prevarication.  On to the news!

When booking flights recently, have you gotten the feeling that more and more seats are off-limits — unless, of course, you're willing to pay an additional fee?  Well, it's not just a feeling: According to the Wall Street Journal, airlines are increasingly charging passengers not only for choice seats (such as those in the exit rows), but even pretty much any assigned seat — other than, say, a middle seat in the back of the plane, snuggled right next to the bathrooms. And it's not just comfort (such as it is) that's at stake: As the story reports, passengers who come to the airport with unassigned seats — i.e., those who decline to play the airlines' game of musical chairs and pay the fee — are more likely to get bumped, in the event of an oversold flight.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Surely most of you read a couple of weeks ago (either with horror or amusement — or more likely a mixture of both) about the now-infamous $16 muffin at a recent Justice Department meeting at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. Well, the ombudsman for the Washington Post, which brought the Justice Department inspector general's report that cited the costly pastry to the public's attention, recently revisited the issue, and determined that the reporting wasn't entirely accurate.

Patrick B. Pexton, the newspaper's ombudsman, writes: "[A]s a journalist, my instinct tells me that the muffin story was just a bit too good to be true."

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to Extra, Extra!, the Convene blog's semi-weekly news supplement.  So what's news?

IMEX America, scheduled for this coming Oct. 11–13 at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas, has released its full-show preview. Highlights include 1,800 exhibitors and 2,000 hosted buyers. A fifth of the total space at the show will be occupied by European destinations, including Croatia — which, Convene read elsewhere on the Internet, just founded the new Croatian Meeting Professionals Association (CMPA).

In a pair of news items from IAEE, the International Association of Exhibitions and Events, the association has partnered with Prometric "to develop the exhibitions and events industry’s first definition of core competencies in the exhibition management field." Sounds interesting! IAEE President Steven Hacker, CAE, FSAE (who recently announced that he would be stepping down from his position this month, after 21 years with IAEE), said, "This unprecedented initiative ... will provide thousands of exhibitions and events industry professionals a standard for their chosen careers."

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to "Extra, Extra!", Convene's weekly news supplement to PCMA's ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter. Let's get right to it, shall we?

It goes without saying that, in the decade since 9/11, many things have changed — especially for the airlines, as Joe Sharkey discusses in this New York Times article.  He writes:

Airlines in the United States lost $55 billion and shed 160,000 jobs during that decade. But the industry has worked through the economic tumult. A decade later, the system is smaller in terms of capacity, but it’s still in good working order. Last year, for example, 720.4 million people boarded airplanes in the United States, slightly higher even than the 719.1 million passengers in 2000.

Another thing that may be changing over the next decade — in this case, for U.S. hotels — is something you may have seen already in Asia or certain parts of Europe: Namely, large, refillable toiletry bottles in hotel bathrooms. USA Today's Hotel Check-in blog reports that hotels may begin moving toward this system to be green — apparently it's not any cheaper to refill big bottles than it is to provide individual bottles to each guest; but obviously the refill system produces far less waste.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's edition of Extra, Extra!.

Plans for the Phuket (Thailand) International Convention and Exhibition Center (ICEC) are being reviewed as a result of concerns over whether the center could survive a hit from a tsunami — like the one that struck the country, to devastating effect, on Dec. 26, 2004.  According to the Phuket Gazette (now there's a snappily named newspaper), the project already is under a great deal of time pressure, which will be exacerbated by the review process.  Originally scheduled to open in May 2014, the Thai government gave funding to the ICEC on the condition that the center open even earlier, in Nov. 2013.  However, "The design and construction of the center’s main building and adjoining facilities should be ‘tsunami safe’ because tsunamis can strike at any time," said a local public-works government official.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's edition of Extra, Extra!, wherein we round up the most interesting meetings-industry news from around the world.

It used to be said that, "As General Motors goes, so goes the nation."  Is the same true for Orlando and the meetings industry?  According to the Orlando Sentinel newspaper, the city filled eight out of every 10 hotel rooms in March, logging 80.6 percent occupancy.  The last time that happened?  March 2008.  Big trade shows and conventions held at the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) helped: In March, the OCCC hosted the comic-book/sci-fi convention MegaCon, which drew 40,000 fans; CTIA Wireless, with 39,000 attendees; and the Heli-Expo International, which choppered in 15,000 people.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

After a bit of a hiatus, welcome back to Extra, Extra! — Convene's online supplement to the association's ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter.

Hilton Hotels & Resorts last week unveiled its new lobby design, as part of a $40 million renovation of the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner hotel in McLean, Va. The new design fits into what's become or becoming the dominant mode in hotel-lobby functionality: the living room or "great room" format, with lounge areas, a bar/restaurant, and an open-air business center–type area.  According to the company, the design "offers a flexible layout with a living room feel that encourages a social atmosphere where guests can interact, work, and collaborate."  Here's a video intro to the new lobby:

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's edition of Extra, Extra!, wherein we round up news from the meetings- and business-travel industry that we didn't have room to print in our weekly ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter. We hope you enjoy!

According to data provided by OAG–The Official Airline guide, and reported on by USA Today, the 10 largest U.S. airlines had 2.7 percent more seats available in November (obviously a big travel month) than the same time last year. That's a reversal from the trend of the last three years, during which, responding to a weakening (and then flat-out weak) economy, airlines cut capacity, eliminating routes and numbers of planes running those routes. Now that tide is turning — albeit slowly — as airlines carefully adjust their supply to meet the growing demand.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Glad you could join us for this week's Extra, Extra!, wherein we round up interesting, offbeat, and important news from around the meetings industry.

First up is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's goal of reinvigorating Atlantic City by making it more attractive for smaller and midweek conventions and meetings. According to a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, A.C. stands the best chance of accomplishing this if it does the following:

• Focus on regional conventions more likely to seek out a drive-to destination.
• Improve sales and marketing channels to attract small meetings and gatherings, as well as tourists.
• Build more hotel rooms, priced more affordably.
• Comp far fewer guests, offering high-quality hotel rooms to customers paying to stay in them.

Why does A.C. need to attract more of these smaller and midweek meetings, with attendee counts of 250 to 1,000? Because gaming revenue, long the lifeblood of the town, has been dropping steadily and continues to do so: The take over the first 10 months of this year was down 9.1 percent as compared to the same period in 2009.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to Extra, Extra!, Convene's weekly news supplement.

First up is the news, reported by Las Vegas guide VegasTripping.com, that Wynn has begun charging $30 a night for an extra bed in its hotel rooms. JohnH writes:

Now I could spend my time here getting vociferously angry over this policy, but I have made my opinion toward this fee more than clear in the past. I hate this new trend as much as I hate resort fees, but just like the latter, this thing is starting to spread across the industry and there's little that any of us can do about it.

I guess those days of doubling up with a colleague when traveling to a conference — and saving a lot of money in the process — are over, or getting that way.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to another edition of Extra, Extra!, wherein we round up interesting news from around the meetings industry. Here's what's news this week:

More so than many other cities, Las Vegas has had a rough time of it since the recession. But things may be looking up: According to stats from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, convention attendance for Aug. 2010 (the most recent month for which data was available) topped out at 345,095 — a remarkable 46.3 percent rise over Aug. 2009's total. Now, one reason for this marked increase is that two major trade shows, MAGIC (75,000 attendees) and World Market Center (50,000), were held this year in August rather than their traditional September — but still: If Sept. 2010 convention attendance numbers hold up, it could mean that Las Vegas is back on a hot streak.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to Extra, Extra!, after a couple weeks' hiatus. So what's news this week? (Besides, of course, what was published today in ThisWeek@PCMA.)

Do you use TripAdvisor to get a read on hotels in advance of your visit? Have you ever had a hotel in mind and then, due to a particularly savage review, shied away? Well, hoteliers want to have a little more control over this happening in the future, according to this story in the New York Times. Susan Stellin writes, "Although TripAdvisor does allow property owners to post responses to reviews, some hoteliers want the site to monitor comments more actively and take action when managers express concerns, especially when reviews border on libel."

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's installment of Extra, Extra!, where we expand a bit on the meetings-industry news disseminated in our ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter.

In its Oct. 4 issue, the New Yorker published an architectural piece about Las Vegas' new CityCenter development, praising it for its modern sophistication, and for not (as many structures do in Las Vegas) simply cribbing from a previously existing architectural model. The writer described CityCenter thusly:

It is the biggest construction project in the history of Las Vegas. It has three hotels, two condominium towers, a shopping mall, a convention center, a couple of dozen restaurants, a private monorail, and a casino. There was to have been a fourth hotel, whose opening has been delayed indefinitely. But even without it the project contains nearly eighteen million square feet of space, the equivalent of roughly six Empire State Buildings.

That's crazy and awesome! Read more about CityCenter and Las Vegas here.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to ThisWeek@PCMA's online news supplement, Extra, Extra!. So what's meetings-industry news in late September/early October? Let's see:

Party planners will be happy to hear that, after two years of scaled-back (if not entirely canceled) celebrations, holiday parties are apparently back for 2010, according to a story in the Boston Herald. One COO of a restaurant-owning company said its clients did want to hold holiday events in the past couple of years, but that they didn't want to spend so much per person on a meal. Now, though, a senior vice president of the event-planning firm Best of Boston says that companies are planning parties designed to reward their employees, rather than raise a toast to the company's revenue. "It's not lavish, it's conservative, but it's definitely focused on employee recognition," said the senior VP. But the question remains: How will employee spouses feel about once again having to tag along to their significant other's office holiday party?

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to Extra, Extra!, Convene's weekly special supplement to our ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter. (Click here for the ThisWeek archive.) Let's see what's news:

The Wall Street Journal has a fun, splashy review of the decadent new 160-room Armani Hotel Dubai, the first such property by Giorgio Armani — where, because "Mr. Armani doesn't believe in waiting in lines," reception takes place in the guest's room. (Which begs the question: Would you want this amenity? We editors for Convene travel quite a bit for work, as you might imagine, and this writer, for one, isn't so keen on the growing encroachment by staff into guest space. No, I don't need a tour of the room, thanks; I can figure out how to operate the television all by myself.) At any rate, the Armani Hotel Dubai isn't alone: It will soon have fashion-world competition in the form of an 87-room Gucci property and a Palazzo Versace, both in Dubai.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome back to Extra, Extra!, after a one-week hiatus. We've got lots of interesting meetings-industry news that we didn't have room for in this week's edition of ThisWeek@PCMA, so let's get to it!

"Augmented reality" — no, it's not some sort of Star Trek-like "holodeck" (although it's getting there). Rather, it's a newish smart phone technology that uses a phone's built-in camera, GPS, and web access to scan whatever's in the camera's field of vision, and then display that image on the phone's screen with added information — such as, in the case of destinations or venues, food and beverage options, facts and figures, and other information that might be helpful to someone who is unfamiliar with a particular place (such as, say, meeting attendees). Currently this tech is most widely available on the iPhone, in the form of an app called mTrip (which we learned about from this Associated Press story). But who knows what the future may bring?

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's Extra, Extra! — all the news that wasn't fit to print in our weekly ThisWeek newsletter. Let's get right into it:

We all know that cell phones are great for killing time during meetings. That's a given. But what else are they used for, besides talking, texting, Tweeting, and solitaire-playing?

According to results from the Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2010 Portrait of American Travelers survey, 19 percent of all travelers have used their phone to download a travel-related app; 47 percent have gotten around using their phone's built-in GPS; and 46 percent have searched for flight information.

"Clearly, mobile devices are destined to play an increasingly important role in the distribution and sale of travel services in years ahead," said Ypartnership Chairman and CEO Peter C. Yesawich. Click here for more on what people are using their phones for.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Welcome to this week's Extra, Extra!, where we give air time to all the news that wasn't fit to print in PCMA's weekly ThisWeek newsletter.

According to this story in the New York Times, written by a former meetings-industry journalist, the tide of eco-friendly hotels may have — at least for the time being — crashed upon the rocks of recession. One hotelier, who is also a Green Meeting Industry Council board member, said, "Big-ticket items that have long-term return on investment have definitely been put on the back burner."

Quick: Name the most boring thing ever. If you said, "in-flight magazines," you are correct — but maybe not if you consider the airline magazine of the new Afghani airline Safi Airways. In its pages, you can brush up on "Kabul heroin addicts, photos of bullet-pocked tourist sites, and ads for mine-resistant sport-utility vehicles," writes the Wall Street Journal reporter. Who needs to watch, say, Marley & Me for the 500th time when you've got that to read?

Earlier this summer, Stefanie Syman published a book called The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, which traces the history of, well, yoga in America, from its Transcendentalist origins to widespread acceptance by people from all walks of life — even while on the road, as this story from Hotel Interactive discusses. According to the article, business-traveling yogis should seek out Kimpton hotels in particular, as the company is big on the amenity.

Here's some good news for fans of the Crescent City (aka New Orleans, aka N'walins, aka the Big Easy): The 1,193-room Hyatt Regency New Orleans, which has been closed since Hurricane Katrina struck, broke ground last week on its $275 million reopening project! In addition to getting the Hyatt back up to par for a reopening sometime next year, the renovation will also add 200,000 square feet of meeting space, plus two restaurants, two bars, and a coffee shop.

Last but not least, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (great newspaper name, that) reports that the city's planning commission has approved the design for a new downtown convention center — which, by the way, looks really cool: Click through here for the story — featuring an aerial rendering of the new convention center, which appears as though it will feature lots of light and green space.

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

Do you ever feel like, as soon as your annual meeting (or any similar annually or multi-annually reoccurring event that you plan) is finished, that its next edition, hydra-like, rears its lovely but still challenging head? That's how we magazine writers (sometimes) feel about the next issue ... there's always another one! At times it can feel like a treadmill. As such, that's why this week's Extra, Extra! will be a bit on the short side, as we Convene editorial staffers are currently in Day Two of closing our September issue, which, among other enticements, has the second story in our new CMP: Certification Made Possible series! So here goes:

USA Today reports that three hotels in Atlanta — the 502-room Marriott Renaissance among them — will be closing this year. Why? Atlanta has, at the moment, a significant hotel room surplus ... not a bad thing when you've got multiple big conventions descending simultaneously on the city, but not ideal when hoteliers are struggling to fill rooms and, as a result, charging less than $100 a night at top-shelf hotels such as the InterContinental, the Grand Hyatt, and W.

The Wall Street Journal has a fun story about something any business traveler worth his or her salt has surely left behind at least once in a hotel room: cell phone chargers. Hotels collect so many of them that a mini-vernacular has even grown up around the oft-ophaned items: Housekeepers for a hotel company with five properties in Sacramento, Calif., call the mound of left-behind chargers "black spaghetti," while each Omni Hotel & Resort in North America has a charger "graveyard," with at least two bins' full at all times.

Can't tear yourself away from Facebook, but need to book that flight? Worry not: Delta Air Lines just launched its new "Delta Ticket Window" on the near-ubiquitous social-networking site. The application allows customers to search, book flights, and share them with one's friends without ever having to leave Facebook! Thank god — we were worried that Facebook wasn't getting enough of our time.

Speaking of Facebook, the Econsultancy blog has a smart story about "why you need a social media strategy, not a Facebook strategy." It begins:

The first venture into social media for many companies, whether a small start up or a big brand, is to create a Facebook page to 'experiment' with social media, which is seen as an add on to other marketing activities.

But just putting a page up onto Facebook, with no coherent social media strategy, is unlikely to do anything for a brand.

And finally, the weirdest story of the week award goes to this one from The Guardian newspaper, about three bored kids (ages 15, 13, and 11) who, unbeknownst to their parental units, pooled their savings of $700 to buy three tickets on Southwest Airlines from Jacksonville, Fla., to Nashville — and they were actually able to board and fly on the plane.

Where were they going, you ask? Get this: Dollywood, the Dolly Parton-themed amusement park. I never knew that Dolly Parton had such cross-generational appeal. I think the kids' effort is at least deserving of a mini-concert by the legendary country singer, don't you?

Extra, Extra!: Convene Newsstand

You might say that what follows is all the news that wasn't fit to print, as these are the stories that — interesting though they may be — we just didn't have room for in the weekly ThisWeek@PCMA newsletter. But you, Dear Web-Savvy Reader, are in luck! Because where we're going, we don't need roads. Or something like that.

Attendees and exhibitors at Reed Exhibitions' GIBTM, The Gulf Incentive, Business Travel & Meetings Exhibition, next March may want to leave their BlackBerrys at home: The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi (where GIBTM is held) has banned BlackBerry users from e-mailing, instant-messaging, or browsing the Web while in the country. Why? Because BlackBerrys, unlike most other devices used to connect to the Web, transmits its data to offshore servers, and therefore cannot be monitored by the U.A.E. government.

Some good news for business travelers who are all for anything that will minimize their time in airports: Continental is testing "self-boarding" at one gate at its Houston hub airport. Passengers simply swipe their boarding pass, which opens a turnstile or door that leads to the jet-bridge.

Those who mourned the death of the Registered Traveled program, and its expedited airport security lanes — aka Clear lanes — last summer are also in luck, as Registered Traveler, in the form of a new program called iQueue, has risen from the ashes at the Indianapolis Airport.

An impressive new green hotel tower, the 36-story InterContinental, recently celebrated its "vine-cutting" in New York City's Times Square. The 607-room property, according to the New York Times' City Room blog, "uses compact fluorescent and L.E.D. lights, low-flow toilets, 'green' housekeeping products and off-site composting." NYC-loving or -native meeting planners will also appreciate the hotel's meeting rooms, which are named after parks in Manhattan.

Meeting planners who wish at add some Hollywood pizazz to general-session videos will be interested to know that, due to the Librarian of Congress (no kidding, there is a real "Librarian of Congress") issuing new rules concerning digital copyright law, individuals are now legally allowed to break digital rights management, or DRM, "for the purposes of 'short' use in both 'documentary filmmaking' and original 'noncommercial videos,'" according to Gizmodo:

The broadness of the latter is impressive ... as long as you aren't charging money for it or profiting off it, it's noncommercial. So go ahead, rip and remix a scene from Inception so that it actually makes sense.

Oh, and another thing? You are now free to "jailbreak" your iPhone from its AT&T stranglehold.

Last but not least: Memphis is clearly reading this blog.