Open Forum

Hi, Community members, and happy Monday! For this edition of Huddle of the Week, we want to hear from both our hospitality and event professionals. During these unforeseen times and looking towards the future, hotels and venues are implementing new health & safety measures that were otherwise unfamiliar to our industry, and quite honestly, the world. Our suppliers are tasked with not only following and executing these new measures, but also sharing these updates with their event planner partners. This will become a key aspect of the partnership when we return to in-person and hybrid events. Keeping this in mind, please review and respond to this week's discussion questions:

• As a hotelier, outside of social media, how else are you keeping planners updated on your increasing health & safety measures? What channels have you seen the most success?
• As a planner, what is your preferred channel for a hotelier to promote their health & safety measures to you? What is your preference for hoteliers to keep you informed moving forward, as well?

As always, please share your thoughts/ideas/responses, and don't hesitate to ask any additional questions that may come up. #HuddleoftheWeek #VoiceIt

Note: You can always review Cvent's Source Safely Resource Hub to get the latest protocol updates from global venues in the #CventSupplierNetwork. 

#BiddingonGroupBusiness
#SourcingaVenue

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Danni Czark
Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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Hi Dani,
It would be great if that information was included in the Cvent Supplier Network as well as on their website where they have other venue information for meeting planners.

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Lori Wildman
Senior Marketing Manager
DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.
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Hi Danielle, 

From the event planner side, we've been receiving updated packets from our hotels along with their bids on our 2021/2022 RFPs. This works well for us because it allows us to integrate those new health & safety standards in our venue selection process. I've found it less useful when it's a hotel not currently bidding on anything emailing us out of the blue. 

Cheers,

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Béline FALZON
Conference Program Specialist II
California Teachers Association
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• As a planner, what is your preferred channel for a hotelier to promote their health & safety measures to you? What is your preference for hoteliers to keep you informed moving forward, as well?

For hotels that I have current contracts or upcoming events with, I would like email correspondence and in some cases (larger events) a personal phone call about what I can expect for my guests. 

For hotels that I do not have any involvement with yet, I'd like to be able to find information on what they are doing to keep guests safe on their social media pages. I recently came across a hotel who had used the saved stories on their instagram account to showcase all of their COVID protocals so guests could check it at anytime from their home page. It was really clever and I did go ahead and book that hotel (for a personal stay) based on how simple it was for me to locate this information.

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Sharna Pascolo
Program Director
Texas Society of Architects
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• As a planner, what is your preferred channel for a hotelier to promote their health & safety measures to you? What is your preference for hoteliers to keep you informed moving forward, as well?
  • I agree with other comments here that I'd love to see hoteliers post to social media channels, venue website(s), and include this in the Cvent Supplier Network. For those I'm working with directly, I'd expect to get a personal update. 

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Stacy Wright, CMP
Senior Manager, US Congresses & Events
Galderma Laboratories, L.P..
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Dani, 
I am so glad Cvent listed the brands cleanliness updates on the hotels profile in Cvent.  It's been so helpful!  I think the Brands are doing a great job at updating websites too! 
Thanks!

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Colleen Beck
Director of Sales & Marketing
The Westin Tampa Bay
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We typically call the venue.  Keep the lines of communication open.

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Edward House
App and Tech Supprt
Virginia Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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Danielle,

we encourage our partners to update their website and Cvent account to add that information. In addition, we have created a microsite as part of our website where we keep track of this information, have partners sign up to show their participation - https://www.fortworth.com/health-and-safety/ and https://www.fortworth.com/health-and-safety/meetings-fort-worth/ - and we have added amenity fields for our partners to update (or we can do so internally) via our CRM.

We keep in touch with our hotel partners, and provide the information to our clients to ensure that they can experience a healthy and safe environment.

We also work very close with our community to ensure we support any needs they might have.

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Andrea Timbes
CRM Administrator & Lead Catcher
Visit Fort Worth
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Hi all,

Thank you so much for your responses and insight! It is great to see that you all are keeping open lines of communication and looking to the future for in-person and hybrid events.

I wanted to share some exciting news - to continue the conversation on safer in-person events, the Community will be hosting another Ask the Expert session here in the Open Forum! The live session will take place on Thursday, October 29th from 11am-12pm ET, and the discussion link is available now, so you can share your questions anytime between now and the 29th. 

Our expert panel includes @Andrea Timbes-Cox​​​, so be sure to get your questions ready to ask her :) It will also feature an expert from the planner side for anyone seeking best practices on how to approach this process from the beginning planning stages. 

Please let me know if you have any questions. Looking forward to seeing your questions over on the Ask the Expert thread! 

Best,

Danni

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Danni Czark
Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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