A NEW campaign by Conrad Macao, Cotai Central is giving meeting planners a chance to take home a bed worth US$5,000 for free when they book a residential meeting with at least 100 cumulative room nights by the end of July.

To qualify for the Take Me to Bed promotion, meetings must be valued at US$40,000 and include a full-day meeting package that costs HK$680 (US$87) per room. The meeting must also be held by December 31, 2015.

Besides Take Me to Bed, Conrad Macao is offering a variety of packages that suit events of all kinds.

The Meetings More Rewarded programme offers various perks, including five per cent off the master bill and welcome entertainment performance, to groups that consume at least 25 rooms and a meeting package for one night. Bookings must be made by August 31 this year and held by December 31, 2015.

The Intimate Meetings programme gives away one room with every 10 Deluxe Rooms or Suites booked. Meetings must be contracted by December 31, 2014 for arrivals by December 31, 2015.

Email conrad.macao.sales@conradhotels.com for more information.

A NEW executive club lounge has opened on levels 38 and 39 of Mandarin Orchard Singapore, taking over the location of the hotel’s iconic revolving rooftop restaurant.

Meritus Club Lounge at Top of the M features a separate reception and meeting rooms on the lower level while the upper floor has a main dining area for 95 guests. Meritus Club guests can enjoy a 360-degree panoramic view of the city skyline through floor-to-ceiling glass windows as well as all-day culinary refreshments.

To meet business meeting and conferencing needs, an eight-seat boardroom is available. It is fitted with state-of-the-art audiovisual capabilities, high-speed Internet connectivity and overhead projection.

JOY Florentino has joined Marriott Hotel Manila as its first director for convention sales, in anticipation of the January 2015 opening of the 6,800m2 Marriott Grand Ballroom and 228-room Hotel Tower.

Florentino has a strong background in the MICE trade. She is a certified meeting planner, former associate vice chair of the California Society of Association Executives and past president of Meeting Professionals International, Sacramento Sierra Nevada Chapter.

She also worked with Marriott International as director of sales for the Sacramento Area Cluster and senior market account executive for Western Mountain Pacific Sales where she implemented strategies for identifying key association accounts.

FOLLOWING an intensive tender process, Staging Connections has been given the contract to provide all audiovisual requirements at Ivy Ballroom and the Sunroom, venues under Australian hospitality and entertainment company, Merivale.

According to a press release, Staging Connections was chosen for its “varied experience and global reputation for delivering engaging event solutions”.

The Ivy Ballroom is a 509m2 open plan venue in the middle of Sydney’s CBD. It boasts six-metre high ceilings with white chandeliers. The full Ivy compound provides additional bookable spaces such as a lawn and a terrace, and various dining outlets.

THE existing marketing model to attract meetings is “broken” and destinations must adopt new methods, according to MCI Group COO for Asia-Pacific, Oscar Cerezales.

“Current strategies are not client-centric. Corporation and association event planners (have) a completely different approach,” he said in the new Global Report on the Meeting Industry which was presented by the UN World Tourism Organization at its headquarters in Madrid last Thursday.

Calling for destinations to “reinvent the game”, Cerezales noted that almost 90 per cent of destination management organisations/convention bureaus “cannot (make) quick decisions as they belong to regional or national tourism bodies… therefore the number of levels of bureaucracy can make decision-making extremely complicated”.

Cerezales also observed that destinations are still using traditional marketing strategies that “have not been updated for 20 years” with limited use of new technologies or “smart and social media campaigns”.

He suggested that destinations could develop a brand for meetings and to “position themselves” as how the Scandinavian members of ICCA had done by claiming to be the world’s first sustainable meetings region.

There are now too many destination management organisations/convention bureaus, he opined, leading to a “stretching of resources (that) does not provide a high level of efficiency”.

He also urged destinations to be better funded and more technologically friendly.

According to Cerezales, destinations will eventually become “the owners of events”, a change that will coincide with “an explosion in the number of events” that will be “smaller and more targeted to suit the locality, which often means they fly under the radar of destinations where the focus is big is best”.

In introducing the report, UNWTO secretary general Taleb Rifai said that with business events accounting for a quarter of travel, it was important that the sector be seen “not just as a product but a collection of many products” as it links with other trading sectors in a local economy.

LAST month’s merger of ACTIVE Network Business Solutions and Lanyon in the US means corporate travel and strategic meeting management programme (SMMP) managers will have access to next-generation tools that provide a full view of spend and eliminate multiple-point solutions to gather spend data on their hotel and event programmes.

ACTIVE, a leader in event marketing and Strategic Meetings Management technology, and Lanyon, a transient hotel programme technology leader will now operate under the Lanyon brand.

Lanyon’s clients include 875 corporate clients and 35 of the world’s largest intermediaries. In addition to data and analytics tools, it also provides hospitality and venue suppliers with access to thousands of corporate customers and associations searching for new properties and venues.

Kevin Iwamoto, vice president of industry strategy, Lanyon, said: “Next-generation tools that enable the consolidation of data are expected to become the norm as corporate buyers seek to capture and utilise business intelligence from their organisation’s overall meetings, events, transient business travel and hospitality spend.

“This consolidation will help corporate buyers and programme managers to become more savvy when it comes to supplier negotiations because it will provide them with a 360-degree view of their spend on everything from small meetings, to Strategic Meetings Management Programmes, to large and complex events,” he added, saying Lanyon is the first technology company in the forefront of this trend.

To capture, control and manage meetings, events and transient hotel spend, companies require a series of end-to-end processes that address hotel and venue sourcing, analytics, reporting, spend management and compliance.

Iwamoto noted most corporations today use multiple-point solutions to gather data on their hotel programme spend and use a separate set of point solutions for their meetings and event spend.

The merger enables clients to combine all data from the organisation’s travel and event spend into a single technology platform and reduce disparate data points where they have to manually gather data from, to create reports.

“This type of access to Big Data regarding spend is expected to lead to smarter supplier organisations, and enable corporations to create meetings, events, corporate transient travel and hospitality strategies that tie back to the strategy of the larger organisation,” Iwamoto noted.