Prospective clients and event planners will be able to seek advice and case studies from specific American states. Photo Credit: Gettyimages/TakakoWatanabe
The Meetings Mean Business (MMB) coalition has launched the Meet Safe
platform to showcase the value that face-to-face meetings can bring to
the economy and to assert that restarting the events segment is
essential to economic recovery. To become the robust resource MMB has
envisioned, the site needs planners, destination representatives, and
venue and hotel executives to provide details about the meetings they've
held successfully. The platform is currently in a building-out stage.
"We want to provide a visual medium so people can see how a safe
meeting is put in place," said Nan Marchand Beauvois, senior vice
president of membership and industry relations for the U.S. Travel
Association and managing director of MMB, noting that event hosts will
be adding video and photographs among their event details, as well as
contact information, so a person who wants to host a meeting in, say,
Wichita, Kan., can get advice from someone who already has held a
meeting there.
Developed in partnership with Simpleview, which creates customised
online tools for convention and visitor bureaus and other industry
organisations, Meet Safe underscores that, with the proper adherence to
state and city gathering limits, as well as following health-and-safety
best practices, in-person and hybrid meetings can take place now and
into the future.
Beauvois said there are two further goals set for the Meet Safe
platform. "We also want to use it to position with policy makers the
importance of this industry, to show them that meetings can move
forward," she said.
"And the third goal is to engage with corporate America, because
business travel and business meetings are so stagnant. There's a lot of
reasons for that, but we wanted to be able to showcase that such events
can happen."
Independent event-marketing manager Melissa Pabian, CMP, feels the
resources at Meet Safe might help her convince clients to take the leap
and make a real plan for an event. "That's one of the biggest challenges
we're running into — it's not that we planners don't have confidence to
hold events, but the client isn't comfortable with it," she said.
The information downloads planned for Meet Safe are exactly what
pharmaceutical planner Bernadette Mari is looking for. "I've been
reading the trades, looking to see what people are doing successfully or
not successfully," she said. "I want to know what people are doing
first so I can make my own game plan. Every hotel is saying what they're
going to do, but I want to know what really happens."
Events currently highlighted on the site include Meeting
Professionals International's WEC, held in Grapevine, Texas, 3 November;
and the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau's Annual Tourism
Meeting at the Miami Beach Convention Center 21 October. Beauvois hopes
that by January, Meet Safe will be populated with at least one
successful event from each state.
To upload information to the platform, meeting hosts and venue
operators, planners, destination marketing professionals and suppliers
can submit details here about their in-person or hybrid events. Best
practices for submissions can be found here; for more information,
contact Caroline Campbell, U.S. Travel's manager of national council and
industry relations.