Making the best choice

Every city may be unique, but not necessarily a fit for your convention group's needs. What is the best way for a meeting planner and its committee to ultimately select the best convention city? How do you even go about developing the list of contenders that might meet your needs?

The editors of MeetingSource.com suggest you take what you already know about the planning process, break it down in analytical steps, and use available resources. Travel times, room rates and function space availabilities, even cultural indexes, are available online. Best of all, MeetingSource.com has developed a new tool – the Site Selection Optimizer that organizes all these factors in one place.

This new tool will help you sort and compare leading destinations based on these factors:

1. Convention Center availability - Check and see if the destinations you’re interested in have a convention center, especially if your event has outgrown the hotel.

2. Sleeping rooms - How many total rooms does an area afford? This will give you a quick indication if there will be enough to accommodate your group.

3. Airports and the number of direct flights – What is most important for your group, budget or the value of time for attendees? This information is available in several forms, and a clue to both is the number of direct flights a city has and the distance of the airport to the convention center.

4. Average room rates for every city are available online. Like total hotel rooms, this is a quick comparison that is subject to change with availabilities for that season.

5. Unique characteristics - Here are factors that only you will know. What other unique considerations about the group make some destinations shine compared to others? If the convention is about green building, it’s easy to select a city and convention center that would reinforce your message.

While the initial heavy lifting can be done by an application like MeetingSource.com’s Site Selection Optimizer program, for much of the other information, there is one source that is invaluable and sometimes over looked: Convention & Visitors Bureaus (CVBs). CVBs might be the single best resource for getting any missing detail. Room availabilities vary from season to season. Due to constraints on availability it is possible that a meeting in Atlantic City may have more room night s available than one In New York City, a destinations with five times as many rooms.

Once the destination is decided, they can be helpful with matching your group to their city’s resources to make the most for your event.
Information, unique requirements and/or requests for special deals and programs can be directed to this source.

MeetingSource.com lists over 700 of Destination Marketing Organizations and Convention Centers under its “locations” tab.