With the new year comes a slew of new meeting trends for 2012. While shorter, local meetings with fewer attendees and more substantial educational content have been trending upward ever since travel and meetings budgets were cut, some newer trends are also taking shape.
A recent article from Successful Meetings highlighted the top trends for various aspects of meetings, from destinations to speakers to format to food. There were several concepts that emerged as common themes for meetings this year:
- Novelty and deviation from routine events - a focus on originality and unique experiences for attendees
- Maximizing a tight budget; Rethinking hotel, speaker and food choices to bring attendees something new that will cost less and have a bigger impact
- A continued focus on local trends and the uniqueness of a particular region for a memorable event
- Quality both in and out of the meeting room - engaging and interactive learning experiences and content during both sessions and down time
Ultimately, the main theme for 2012 is an emphasis on value. Planners are urged to look at the strategy and purpose of their event and drive value for attendees. In this economy, everything needs to impact the bottom line, and an emphasis on delivering ROI will also have many planners coming up with creative and fresh twists that serve a purpose and accomplish goals for the event.
Read the full story here.
Many of you know that I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. The 50th state will always hold a special place in my heart as my true home, even though I’ve spent decades on the mainland working on my career in the travel and meetings management industry. I went to the University of Hawaii, which is today ranked 164th out of 1,600 American colleges (by US News & World Report) and, whose Manoa campus (where I went) has more than 20,000 students. I graduated from the College of Business and took some specialized courses in the School of Travel Industry Management (TIM). I actually had a scholarship from Hawaiian Airlines to attend the TIM School, as it’s called by many, and I graduated with a degree in Business Administration. 
I am sure everyone has similar mis-interpretations within the meetings and events business. My own personal example was being asked to supply a "Beamer" for a meeting. In my world, a Beamer was a BMW car. Yet I was very surprised to learn that it was also a humble LCD Projector!
e right responses. In other words, it is not sufficient to simply take a base set of meeting terms and translate them to each language - each term should be relevant to the market from which you are seeking pricing information.
Impressive. Apparently, 4.5 million people signed Google's online petition and Twitter received more than two million posts on the subject by early afternoon, last Wednesday. The English-language version of Wikipedia even shut down in protest. The uproar worked, and Congress dropped the two bills -- the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act.
You're not alone. Medical meeting planners gathered in a closed-door session at the recent Professional Convention Management Association’s Convening Leaders Annual conference, held January 8–11 in San Diego, to talk with peers about their challenges and how they're resolving them.
StarCite, part of Active Network, has done a lot to help companies of all sizes get ready for this legislation -- via 
I was happy to see quotes from Active CEO Dave Alberga complimenting the StarCite technology and talking about how well both companies' technologies will ultimately fit together. He said the acquisition is a "key step we're taking to evolve the meetings industry from one that focuses on meeting logistics and spend management to one that includes continuous community engagement, enabling organizations to build lifetime value with their customers and employees."
Well, along comes this latest news tidbit ... that I just had to share.
By the way, if you're attending the Business Travel Show in London from Feb. 7-8, why not register for the "Masterclass" session that I'm leading:
My buddy, travel industry consultant 
Chicago
Credit card surcharges levied by Europe's airlines are becoming a fact of life: £6 per person, per leg "administration fee" charged by Ryanair for all cards except one – a pre-loaded debit card; 2.5% of fare by Easyjet; a £4.50 per booking credit card fee from British Airways, and a charge of up to 17 euros (£14.16) per person by Air Berlin.
An article in 
Natural and man-made disasters over the past year have made it clear how important it is for meetings and travel managers to have a global Duty of Care plan in place for their attendees, employees, and travelers. 
There I was this morning, fingers on my keyboard, all ready to write about my resolutions for the new year, when I stumbled across 
Perhaps you've heard of Atos, the international information technology services company whose CEO, Thierry Breton, has publicly stated a goal of bringing his giant company to a zero-email deadline by 2014. That would be quite a feat for a company whose 80,000 employees across 42 countries receive an average of 100 emails per day. Breton's plan is for employees to communicate more via social media tools and instant messaging. 
I've always felt that the holidays are a great time to reflect on the important people in our lives, what we've accomplished over the past year and where our goals will take us in the new year.
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