Venue selection criteria

The emphasis of this section of the current chapter has been on the supply of venues and the facilities they offer in the meetings market. But when faced with such a plethora of venues, what are the main criteria that buyers and suppliers use to decide which venue is the right one for their event? It is interesting to compare the factors that are most important for the corporate sector with those that matter most to association meeting planners. Rankings of the main factors for both mar­ket segments:

Figure 3.3

The most conspicuous, although unsurprising, difference between the two parts of Figure 3.3 is the difference between the factors that each market segment regards as the most important: the corporate sector's overriding need to hold its meetings in premises of the highest quality, contrasting with the associations' focus on value for money for their members. But what is also striking is how often the same selec­tion criteria appear in both lists. Some of these will now be considered.

Capacity and flexibility of meetings facilities

In order to be able to capitalise on their accessibility, it is clear that venues also need to offer the full capacity required by meeting planners and delegates. The number of delegates that any venue is capable of holding is of fundamental importance in respect of what type of meetings event it can hope to attract. Generally, the larger the event, the fewer available venues there will be for consideration at the planning stage. Meeting planners seeking a venue that can host an event for several thousand delegates face a fairly restricted choice, due to the limited supply of ven­ues capable of accommodating such numbers. Consequently, for such meetings, the decisions about the selection of the destination and the venue are often made together, and one can strongly influence the other. Greenhill (2000) highlights this point:

The availability of a purpose-built conference centre with facilities of a suitable size will strongly influence an association's decision to hold their annual event in a particular town. For example, the political parties are limited in the choice of destinations for their annual conferences since only a few destinations have very large venues supported by sufficient infrastructure to accommodate many thousands of delegates.

Related to capacity are issues of flexibility. Planners investigating potential venues for their events may, in addition to knowing the venue's capacity, wish to find out whether syndicate rooms are available; whether on-site catering is a possibility; and whether it is possible to run an exhibition alongside the conference itself. Such factors will often pay a crucial role in the selection process.

Facilities

Nevertheless, the right capacity is only part of what venues must offer in order to succeed in this market. In his list of site location criteria for conference centres, Murphy (cited in Inskeep, 1991) draws attention to other indispensable facilities:

• Central location and accessibility to good-quality hotels and an intercity trans, portation terminal for domestic delegates.

• Close to major shopping and entertainment districts, the prime location being in a downtown or regional business district.

• Availability of parking spaces on site or nearby for people driving to the conferences.

• Proximity to recreation facilities and attractive surroundings as delegates want to maintain their exercise routines and the cities want to encourage sightseeing within the city and environs.

Murphy's last point is reinforced by Mieczkowski (cited in Qu and Li, 1999), who points out that a successful venue should offer a flexible, attractive product to the participants, a mixture of offerings creating optimal conditions not only for work and mutual contacts but also for relaxation, entertainment and fun. By offering facilities and services that satisfy delegates' wishes - and those of their guests, if they are accompanied - to fulfil their leisure and culture pursuits while at the destination, cities are not only adding to their business tourism appeal but are also enabling themselves to maximise the revenue to be made from residential meetings events. One factor has already been mentioned: the existence in the destination of a venue offering the capacity required to host the meeting being planned. When a large meeting event is being planned, which only a limited number of venues would be capable of hosting, the choice of destination and choice of venue will be made together.

However, most of the time, the destination, in the sense of the host city, is decided upon first. Greaves (1998b; p.38) illustrates this point when she reports that in a survey of the UK market, it was found that 78% of corporate buyers choose the location before considering individual venues. She goes on to quote a training course coordinator from Halifax Financial Services: 'We tend to look at the destin­ation first and take into account where most people will be travelling from and the cost. Then we look at the venues.'

What, then, are the criteria that buyers and meeting planners use when selecting a destination? Two of the most important are considered here.

Accessibility

As indicated in the words of the Halifax training coordinator, the destination's accessibility to those invited - or instructed - to attend the event is a key consid­eration. In almost every case, the speed, ease and cost of accessing the destination are more important than the actual distance between the delegates' homes and the place where the meeting is to be held. For this reason, being served by an efficient transport infrastructure is more important for a destination than its actual geo­graphical location. Convincing evidence of this may be seen in the example of the city of Lille in north-eastern France, whose fortunes as a meetings destination received a massive boost in the mid-1990s when it found itself at the hub of the newly opened Channel Tunnel and high-speed train network linking Paris, London and Brussels. The city's conference centre, Lille Grand Palais, which opened in 1994, signed a partnership with Eurostar enabling customers to buy a single trans­port and meetings package. With three auditoria for 1500, 500 and 300 delegates, 16 committee rooms, an arena for 5000 and a banqueting hall for 1200, its ease of accessibility makes it very well placed to compete for business.

However, as regards meetings that are to be attended by delegates from coun­tries situated all over the world, the vital transport criterion is straightforward access by air. Murphy (cited in Inskeep, 1991), for example, emphasises the importance of locating major convention centres in gateway cities that have major national and international airline connections to participants' generating areas around the world. Convenience and speed, in particular, are essential qual­ities sought by those travelling by air to meetings events, as delegates are no longer prepared to tolerate long, time-consuming connections at airports to get to the destination.

It is, however, worthy of note that there is one category of meetings for which lack of accessibility is an advantage rather than a drawback. Events characterised by the confidential or sensitive nature of the discussions to be held - whether by politicians, financiers or the military - often seek isolated venues, well away from the public and the media. For example, following the violent disturbances at the summit of the G8 group of nations in Genoa in 2001, the decision was taken to hold the 2002 summit in the remote mountain village of Kananaskis, situated at the end of a country road in Alberta, Canada.

Image

Taking Paris as an example of a successful destination in the meetings market, it is clear that a key factor for its success is undoubtedly its extremely positive image. Even those who have never been to Paris conceive of it as an exciting destination, which is rich in culture and heritage and relatively safe, an image carefully maintained and fostered by those responsible for marketing it for all types of tourism, including meetings.

The perception of any destination will always have a strong influence on the deci­sion of whether to hold a meeting there. A destination with no particular image or, worse, with a decidedly negative image in the public's perception, will have to struggle to appeal to this market. Images can be formed rhrough various means, including personal experience, but most are created through the media, from novels and cinema to news bulletins and newspaper reports. Nor are images, once established, necessarily stable. A destination's image can receive a boost from, for example, a hallmark event, such as the Olympic Games - as experienced by Australia in the years following Sydney's hosting of the Games in 2000. Equally, cities and countries can gain instant notoriety from widely publicised events, such as Rio de Janeiro's treatment of its street children inthe 1990s, or the Italian police brutality at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa.

However, despite the importance of image as a criterion in the destination selec­tion process, very little research has been carried out in this field. Oppermann (1996) remarks that research into destination selection criteria has centred almost exclusively on the importance to meeting planners of various destination attributes such as cost, accommodation stock and supply of venues.

Nevertheless, as Oppermann (I996a; p.176) points out, image perception plays an important part in not only the process by which the planner selects a destin­ation for the event, but also, in the case of association meetings events in particu­lar, the process by which those invited to the event decide upon whether or not to attend:

While corporate meetings are usually a must for all selected participants, association members attend at their own leisure and frequenrly own expense, while corporate meeting expenses are paid by the employer. Thus, the association meeting sector resembles to a large extent the pleasure tourism sector, especially with regard to the participation and destination selection aspects. Association conference organisers may he viewed as tour operators who select destinations and are trying to sell them to their customers... Potential convention participants are like tourists because they have a wide choice of different conferences at different locations, at varying cost and different times. Therefore, for those invited to association events, the image of the destination can be just as important a determining factor as it is for those considering it as a place to spend a holiday.

Without exception, scores are higher, or at least the same, when they are given by those meetings planners who are already familiar with the destination. This suggests that once a meeting planner has experience of a particular destination, then they are extremely likely to have an improved image of it. Conversely, this means that destinations of which the planner has no experience are at a disadvantage in the selection process - a clear argument in support of destinations investing in familiarisation trips for planners and buyers.

It is highly possible that the same phenomenon of 'familiarity breeds content­ment' also applies to individual venues, with planners needing to be thoroughly convinced of a venue's ability to deliver before using it for the first time, but then being likely to use it again and again.