Exam #3: Class Review  she said this information will be 80% of the test Chapter 11  8 questions on test • Negotiation: the process by which a meeting planner and a hotel representative reach an agreement on the terms and conditions that will govern their relationship before, during, and after a meeting, convention, exposition, or event. • Contracts: Everything in a contract needs to be negotiated o National, state, and local laws o Act of God: extraordinary natural event such as extreme weather, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or similar natural disaster that cannot be reasonably foreseen or prevented and over which a contracting party has no reasonable control. o BE SPECIFIC • Rack Rate: Facility’s standard preestablished guest room rates o 50% of all rooms in all hotels are sold at less than rack rate • Occupancy Rate: Occupancy is lowest on Sunday evenings and highest on Wednesdays • The primary source of hotel income is sleeping room revenue (more than 67% of all hotel revenue is generated from sleeping rooms) • The second largest source of revenue is in food and beverage operations (25% being recorded as “profit”) o A seated dinner for 100 people is worth more to a hotel than a coffee break or continental breakfast for the same number of people • “Dates, Rates, and Space – You Can Only Have Two”: Maxim used by hoteliers to sum up meeting negotiations. The meaning is that the planner can get the dates and meeting space he or she wants for a meeting but may have to give on the rate.• Contracts: Agreement between two or more persons consisting of a promise or mutual promises that the law will enforce, or the performance of which the law recognizes as a duty. o Elements of a contract:  An offer by one party  Acceptance of the offer as presented- done by signing the contract  Consideration (negotiating) • Parol Evidence: or evidence of oral agreement – can be used in limited instances, especially where the plain meaning of words in the written document may be in doubt. • Attrition Clause: performance or slippage clauses- provide for the payment of damages to the hotel when a meeting organizer fails to fully utilize the room block specified in the contract (booked rooms, but then didn’t show up with that amount of people) • Cancellation Clause: provides for damages should the meeting be canceled for reasons other than those specified, either in the same clause or in the termination provision. • Stages of Risk Management: o Preparedness (assessment and analysis): The exhibition organizer would have assessed and analyzed the possible risks during the planning stage. o Mitigation: The planner would try to determine what he or she could do to decrease, for example, the probability that rain would occur. o Response: Figuring out both when to respond and how. o Recovery: Examples would be paying insurance claims for losses suffered by organizer or actions to overcome any bad press, upset members, or exhibitors. • Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA): It is illegal to discriminate against or fail to accommodate people inwheelchairs, with visual or hearing impairments, food restrictions, etc. o ADA applies to meeting planners and organizers • Intellectual Property: o Copyright: Federal law that allows for the ownership of intellectual property (writings, art, music). Copy-written material cannot be used without the owner’s permission or the payment of royalty fees. o The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) are membership organizations that represent individuals who hold the copyright to approximately 95% of the music written in the United States. Chapter 12  7 questions on test • Online RFPs: Request for Proposal: tool many planners used to distribute information to hotels about potential meetings. Allow the planners to input their specs easily, and allow the Web to be conduit for distributing the information to potential cities and hotels. • Virtual Tour: Technology tool that is ideal for remote site inspections but that can also be used in tandem with a traditional site visit, where a planner can call up alternate room setups and capacity information at a single click. o Videos and 360-degree panoramic tours of meeting spaces and sleeping rooms. • Portals: An electronic access point • Marketing and Communications: o Web sites and Strategic Communications: The best Web sites integrate a two-way strategy (blogs/comments, or a Twitter fountaion). o Event Web siteso Web 2.0 and Social Media: the Web site is one facet of the e-marketing strategy of the technology-savvy meeting professional  Web 2.0: refers to all of the online tools where the operative word is interactivity • RSS (Really Simple Syndication): Tool by which a Web site creates or gathers a feed of information about a specific topic and publishes it as an RSS feed. This information is updated continuously. • Blogging: Online diary that is posted on the Web, which allows everyone to become part of the Web, by posting anything that is on his or her mind. • Podcasting: “the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio or video programs, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.” • E-Blasts: Don’t want to overdue it!!! o Opt-in: establish a dialogue, and confirm that the recipient wants to be included in future mailings. o Don’t overdo it: better to spend time on creating useful messages, sent occasionally, rather than mindless reminders, sent repetitively. o WIIFM (technology-version): “What’s In It For Me?” – from the perspective of your customer. Why would they want to read your emails? o Keep it simple: Keep the messages easy to read, and as short as possible. And, if you’re providing any links, make sure that they work. • Selling the Show Floor: By posting the show floor diagram on the Web, and using its interactivity, trade show managers can now offer potential buyers a better look at where they might want their booth.o Advantages of this include updated layouts, as well as helping buyers locate a floor space that is either near or far from their competitors. o The use of colors to represent booths can help differentiate which ones are available, and the ones where premium costs apply. • Online Registration: helps reduce the amount of paper used. • VoIP (Vocie over Internet