Executive Travel : Hotels That Go the Extra Mile

They are part magician, part Hollywood stunt coordinator and part set designer--the employees who coordinate the thousands of meetings that take place each year in U.S. hotels.

New and more elaborate stunts and gimmicks are created every year to entertain and attract attendees. It often falls to the hotel to fulfill requests, which range from the unusual to the unrealistic.

Here is a sampling of some events that have made meeting planners around the country proud--and turned their hair gray.

* Marriott’s Orlando World Center in Florida installed 50 yards of train track in a 51,000-square-foot ballroom so a full-size locomotive engine could blast into the room for the start of a meeting.

* At the JW Marriott Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, Serve Pro Inc., a full-service disaster cleanup company, wanted to bring six of its special vans into the hotel to sell during its convention. The problem: The vans were too tall for the hotel’s garage doors. The solution: Hotel staff deflated the tires on each van, filled the vans with people (to weigh them down) and drove them in with hotel engineers standing on the front and rear bumpers to hold up the sprinkler system pipes in the ceiling as they passed underneath. (The company sold all six vans.)

* At a meeting for the National Recycling Assn., the Kansas City (Mo.) Marriott Downtown was asked to provide a special suite--for a golden eagle. It turned out the eagle couldn’t stay in the same room as its handlers because it couldn’t sleep if there was any movement in the room. (And you thought your CEO was fussy.)

“Handling out-of-the-ordinary requests has become an ordinary part of our job,” said Chris Sullivan, director of convention services at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina. “Sometimes a meeting planner’s plans change on the whim of a CEO, or the planner comes up with a wild idea at the last minute.”

Indeed, the wilder the better as far as some meeting organizers are concerned. It seems that some meeting planners would like their attendees to think they are anywhere but at a meeting.

For example, Hilton Hotel at Walt Disney World Village in Florida turned the Grand Ballroom into a full basketball court for a game between Seven-Up and Coca-Cola employees. Bleachers were set up on one side of the room and filled with cheering hotel employees. On another occasion, a snow-covered mountain was built for a snow mobile company.

The Los Angeles Airport Hilton & Towers recently turned its International Ballroom into a large-scale computer game featuring a laser-tag jungle theme. The creation for a group called Network Professionals included laser lighting and costumes.

AlliedSignal, on the other hand, wanted the International Ballroom to look like a set from “Back to the Future.” The hotel complied, taking half a day to produce the set, which included a DeLorean car, a clock tower and more.

Setting a stage is fine, but some meetings call for a little drama as well. At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the Explorers Club once had a man descend from the sixth floor to the convention room stage on a tightrope.

Animals also play a part in many requests. At a Democratic Party meeting, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach arranged to bring a donkey into the hotel. The donkey had its own entourage (cleanup crew) and used the service elevator. Mutual of Omaha brought a baby elephant and a giant snake to one of its meetings, and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus fed its entire herd of elephants in the front driveway of the hotel.

Hotel employees also have to be adept at fielding last-minute requests, reasonable and otherwise. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Assn. annual convention this year proved so popular, for example, that midway through the event the group, which was meeting at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, decided it needed more trade show space. Marriott removed beds and furnishings from 110 rooms and suites, unboxed and washed 25,000 glasses, brought in 6,000 pounds of ice, and turned the extra space into tasting rooms for 4,000 more cases of spirits--all in six hours and with only two service elevators at its disposal.

And finally, hotel staff members are sometimes called upon to do more than shuttle dinners to tables and pour the coffee. At one banquet at Marriott’s Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Ala., meeting planner discovered the band had been scheduled for the wrong night. In short order, the meeting planner recruited a waiter who had drums in his truck and another who played a guitar and dispatched a driver to fetch a local singer. A placard on a nearby table inspired the newly formed group to call itself the Reserved Band.

Meetings are being booked on much shorter notice, which is a reason meeting planners are sometimes pressed to find creative solutions, said convention director Sullivan.

Meeting planners are already bracing for next year, when the number of meetings is expected to hit record levels. According to Meeting Professionals International in Dallas, the number of meetings planned for 1996 is up 41% over this year’s figure.

And despite corporate edicts to cut back on costs, each company wants its meeting to be more memorable than ever.

“Meeting planners and their bosses expect the meeting has got to be better than last year’s,” Sullivan said.

And while electronic teleconferencing has a niche in the corporate meetings market, nothing matches the impact of watching the CEO bungee jump to the stage.

“People have asked whether the onslaught of technology will eliminate meetings,” said Sullivan. “But people still have to convene--they want to be with the CEO when he delivers the message.”