You’ve worked with a meeting planner for several months and your hotel staff pulled off the event without any major glitches. But, was it really a win?
In group sales, you always want to make your client’s event better and more successful than their last. However, success can mean different things to all parties involved. Most meetings have a wide range of stakeholders, from planners to speakers to sponsors. This can often make it difficult to get a true reading of an event’s success – despite your hotel’s flawless execution.
Plus, with the details and stress involved in every stage of event planning, evaluating success afterwards is often overlooked.
While every event and the total number of its stakeholders vary, at the heart of every meeting – large or small – are three parties:
- meeting planner
- hotel/meeting venue
- attendees
It’s crucial to get a post-event assessment from all three perspectives. These thorough reviews are what will dictate all future meetings and events.
Current Evaluation Methods
Most hotels and hotel brands have formal ways of tracking satisfaction of transient guests. However, evaluating meeting planner satisfaction is much more informal. Various methods are used, from post-event surveys, to meeting with the planner after the event, to even hearsay from convention services staff.
The hotels that organize post-con roundtables with hotel executive staff and the meeting planner are way ahead of the curve when it comes to truly understanding meeting success. Those roundtables allow both hotel staff and the planner to gauge event satisfaction and trade suggestions and feedback.
True Barometer of Event Success
Even with different insights and different roles that meeting planners and hotels bring to the table, the attendee is the ultimate measurement of a successful event.
Working together and sharing the workload is also extremely important, but the attendee is the reason why the event is held.
The attendee is everyone’s customer and all goals should be tied to the success of the attendees, not just the meeting owner.
Everyone is invested in attendee satisfaction.
Define Success Ahead of Time
Understanding what attendees need – even before the event begins – is key to assessing event performance.
When both the hotel and the planner are transparent with objectives and the mark of attendees’ success BEFORE the event, it can be freeing to both sides.
This transparency ensures that they both have the same goal in mind ….a great meeting! This also sets the stage for continuous improvement.
When answering the questions, “How did the event go?” and “Should we do it again?”, look at the goals tied to attendee satisfaction. Even with sky-high registration or booming product sales, it’s whether or not an attendee would return which serves as the final barometer of event success.
Knowing what went well for them, and what didn’t, will give you valuable, unprecedented lessons for future events.