Saturday, August 16, 2008

Some different hotel advice

Normally I offer advice for traveling and how not to make hotel employees want to eviscerate you in front of your children. This time I'm going to offer up advice to people who work in sales and marketing and those who plan events.

Right now in Tampa there is an event known as FetishCon. For the completely clueless, this would be a convention for people that are into the fetish scene/lifestyle (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism, etc.). I would be there right now if I didn't have to work. Possibly in my black and red vinyl corset ans matching skirt, or in my schoolgirl outfit. I'll stop digressing. At the same time, there is also a Women of Faith convention also in Tampa. I've had several of the ladies from the Women of Faith convention come to my hotel looking for a room because they were staying at the hotel that is hosting FetishCon. Unfortunately all the hotels in downtown are booked solid with one large group or another. There's 3 large groups occupying the hotel I work at tonight, Women of Faith being one of them.

So what can we learn from this? While I understand that large groups of any kind tend to bring in a great deal of money, conflicting groups make for unhappy guests. Having a group that is there blatantly for the purpose of sin and debauchery (and proud of it) staying at the same hotel as a religious group is bound to make some conflict. People that set up the group booking contracts should take this sort of thing into consideration. Think about it, what if a large group of fundamentalist Christian zealots were having a convention the same weekend as a GLBT pride convention? Could you see that madness that would ensue if they were all staying at the same hotel? Yeah that's a bit of an extreme but I think you get my point. What ultimately ends up happening is that a hotel winds up with unhappy guests and a loss of business from guests cutting their stay short and staying somewhere else. This also makes groups consider no longer using said hotel for their events.

So plan events accordingly. Find out what other events are going on at the same time if possible. If you are a sales/marketing type person at a hotel, it might be smart to warn groups if a potentially conflicting group has already booked the same date. This makes for happy guests and happy people that have to deal with the guests.

I think too much, this is why I never get anywhere in life.

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