New Orleans, LA — August 31, 2015 — Julie Couret Willoz plans a lot of corporate meetings. She’s presented at conferences and facilitated presentations that number in the hundreds – most in hotel meeting spaces designed for precisely that purpose.
So when her client, New Orleans-based Expotel Hospitality Services, LLC told her of their plans for trying something “new” for their annual summer meeting this year, she was excited. Besides, she knew, who better to test the limits of the industry movement towards out-of-the-box “meeting experiences” than a hotel management company that specializes in the meeting business?
The Expotel Hospitality summer event was planned in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “That was the first clue for their leadership team that this would be different,” Willoz said. “None of the 35 executives who attended could have imaged just how different.”
What they discovered was a unique location that offered the perfect setting to test out some creative “meeting experiences” and various forms of learning “edutainment.” Instead of a four day agenda with meeting sessions using solely the resort hotel’s facilities, punctuated with periodic down time for sight-seeing, Expotel executives often led the team off-site through San Juan for much of their meeting time.
“While we made great creative use of many of the resort’s facilities that brought the feeling of the destination into the meetings, we also did a lot of the reverse. We left the power point decks and laptops behind for meeting time in a museum gallery, a chocolate factory, a restaurant courtyard – even a sailing yacht,” Willoz recalled. “In fact, we didn’t even have an actual agenda – we just used a timetable to move from one interesting spot to another throughout the region.”
And the result? In essence, a “conference” never got on track, intentionally. A well-conceived and executed “un-conference” took its place. Participant surveys called the week “amazing,” “the best company learning and team building time ever,” and “simply wow.”
Expotel Hospitality Corporate Revenue Director Billy Finnorn, who collaborated on the meeting planning with the company’s sales and marketing vice-president, Danielle DeGeorge, reviewed all the survey findings. “You’d look at the pictures we took everywhere and think it was just one big family reunion,” he admitted. “But in reality, we got all the work done that we planned with probably more ‘stickiness’ about it than any time before.”
DeGeorge said the meeting allowed the company to experiment itself with the very business trend that she knows customers are seeking out today: more creativity. “We know that inventive and innovative settings and designs inside and out of the customary hotel meeting room are what meeting planners are looking for now,” she commented. “The emphasis is on the experience. Planners want more productive, inspired and memorable engagement among participants. We really understand now how setting plays a big key to that success.”
Willoz told a story that summed up Expotel Hospitality’s event: “Someone told me about a conversation he and several others were having while strolling through a tropical rain forest. He said he learned more about each person and the topic they discussed in an hour than everything he had ever known in the last three years.
“The power of that kind of experience is just huge for companies looking for a new edge with their meeting time.”
