THE MEETING PLACE IN BRIEF


• venue specialist etc.venues will open its ninth location in March. Situated in London's Paddington Waterside Development, the new venue is a few minutes walk from Paddington Station and will have ten meeting rooms with capacity for up to 500 delegates.


• MARITIM hotels has introduced a customisable “Maritim à la Carte” conference package which allows customers to add service components according to their individual requirements and budgets.


• The Celtic Manor Resort, in South Wales, is offering a pair of designer shoes to every conference organiser who books an event worth more than £100,000. Worn by celebrities including Angelie Jolie and Victoria Beckham, the shoes up for grabs are haute couture Christian Louboutin, with trademark shiny red soles.


• leeds United Football Club has opened a new Centenary Pavilion at Elland Road. Opened by club legend Allan Clarke, it is one of the biggest venues of its kind in Northern England with capacity to host almost 3,000 visitors and seat over 1,200 people for dinner.


• wyck Hill House Hotel, near Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire, is currently pushing its flexible meeting options to the corporate market. The Georgian manor house and its extension provide conference facilities with four meetings rooms.


• TRInITy Conferences has launched a new online event organisers’guide. Available at www. eventorganisersguide.co.uk, it is a free resource designed to help conference and meeting organisers plan and manage their events. The website can be used as a training tool and includes a library of support information on finding the perfect venue, meeting room layouts, site visits, green meetings, contract negotiation and more.


• MenZIes Cambridge Hotel & Conference Centre is launching a meeting amnesty for two days. On January 10th and 17th local companies will be given the opportunity to trial the hotel’s new ‘Premier Meetings’ concept on a pro-bono basis. To qualify for the complementary trial for up to ten day- delegates, corporate bookers must be able to prove they are already holding a provisional booking for up to ten guests in another property in the Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire vicinity. Qualifying companies will be offered a meeting room on a first come first served basis.


➔ Kent's Tudor venue


HBAA UPDATE


PETER DUCKER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOTEL BOOKING AGENTS ASSOCIATION


LEEDS Castle in Kent has opened a new hospitality venue in its Maiden's Tower. Set on the castle island, surrounded by a moat and 500 acres of tranquil parkland, the Maiden’s Tower provides privacy and security for residential and day conferences, meetings and corporate hospitality. Originally a 16th century Tudor


bake house, the tower has been fully refurbished during a multi- million pound restoration. The tower offers an imposing entrance hall with stone flagged floor leading to two conference


rooms: the Gallery and the Tudor Hall, each able to accommodate up to 40 delegates boardroom- style or 100 theatre-style. The venue is suitable for product launches, presentations, business lunches, meetings, seminars or conferences, and is equipped with AV facilities and wireless internet throughout. A walled garden offers private outdoor space. Upstairs there are five bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms and views of the golf course and the estate. There are 35 additional bedrooms available in other castle buildings.


MWB OVERHAULS BRAND STANDARDS


A FAMILIAR face has joined a major venue provider. Morag Alabaster, the long-serving executive at Zibrant, is now a board director at MWB Meeting Venues, part of MWB Business Exchange plc and sister company to De Vere and Malmaison Hotels. The company has 43 venues


with over 300 rooms in the UK, offering capacity for between two and 130 people. Of those, 11 in London are key corporate spaces and Alabaster’s arrival has prompted an overhaul of these particular facilities to meet new brand standards. One, at 10 Greycoat Place, Victoria, will expand the largest booking to up to 250 people theatre-style and is due to be ready for business this month. This and the Liverpool Street venue are MWB's two flagship facilities.


The overhaul will create ‘meeting


pods’ which will include meeting space, breakout area and syndicate rooms that utilise the expertise of hotel designers to give it a contemporary boutique hotel look and feel. “We’re moving away from a classroom feel and introducing a high-design influence,” Alabaster explains. Technology includes wireless


and broadband facilities while VC equipment can be hired in. There is no firewall issue. Hot and cold food is brought in while service delivery is “on a par with a hotel,” says Alabaster. “No client ever has enough internal space so it’s the right time to make the big move to non-residential space. We’re making sure that we’ve got the right product in the market,” she adds. Day delegate rates start from £48 in London.


WHILE we were in the depths of the recession I developed a theory about the counter-cyclical nature of associations: the worse the business climate got, the more the HBAA’s membership grew. I assumed it was because in uncertain times people want to gather together to check their experiences are not unique. It was a good theory, and all the facts fitted. Now I am not so sure. We’ve just completed another record year. Everyone has a clear view of their market and a grip on “The New Normal”, and I’ve started working on Ducker’s second theory. Everything is just moving so fast and seems so random that being wired into the network is now absolutely essential. Just look at what’s happening. London hotels are enjoying record business, yet travel 50 miles outside the capital and it’s good weeks followed by bad weeks with no rhyme nor reason. Everyone I speak to, regardless of their industry says it's the same pattern – business is best described as unpredictable. There’s the nub of it. Unpredictable equals uncertainty, equals jittery. We’ve all seen it in our businesses. The best defence is good intelligence – the wider you look, the more you see. Being part of an active association gives you that vision. So why do London hoteliers join in droves. Quite simply because they know that their good fortune results from a significant market shift – it’s leisure that is ringing their tills. But they are very aware that they disenfranchise the corporate and meetings market at their peril. The outlook for the next two years


in London is very strange – there's a Royal Wedding, Diamond Jubilee and then the Olympics – so expect highs, lows and everything in between. That’s why London hotels want to communicate with their corporate and meetings clients. So networking is the way forward.


The HBAA – where members are hotel booking agencies, hotels and venue companies – are keen to form an advisory council, bringing informed buyers into events to examine market intelligence and interpret its impact. And that’s really Ducker’s third theory of associations – they thrive when they deliver value to the industry that they serve.


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