HOW MANY SITE VISITS FOR PROSPECTIVE BUSINESS DO YOU ATTEND EVERY YEAR?
1b
4to6 14%
None 12%
1to3 69%
7to9 3%
10 or more 2%
I pay my own way 7%
WHO USUALLY PAYS FOR YOU TO ATTEND THESE?
The organization I work for 57%
The hosting organization (CVB, hotel, convention center) 57%
Last October, VISIT Milwaukee held a three-day fam trip—cheekily dubbed an “unFAM”—for 24 meeting planners from around the country. Experient Sourcing Manager Tabitha Sparks was in attendance — and had just the type of experience that convention and visitors bureaus are seeking to engender when they host planner-orientation trips.
“[Milwaukee’s unFAM] was very beneficial to me,
because I totally had a different perception of the city,” Sparks said. “It was beneficial to learn about all of [Mil- waukee’s] new appointments, and how lush its history and culture was. I had already pegged it to be a second-rate Chicago, so I was quite refreshed by the unFAM, even though I already knew what their hotel layout was. If I just saw the hotels, I never would have gotten a sense of what the city is like.” That’s generally why planners go on fam trips and site
visits, an enterprise that people outside the industry might see as nothing more than a glamorous — even frivolous — perk, but that play an important role when it comes to matching an event with its ideal destination. Indeed, the importance that meeting professionals attach to them was underscored by the hundreds of comments that respondents made in Convene’s most recent e-panel survey. (Look for the survey results — along with some of those comments — throughout this article.) Certainly fam trips are real work, as Convene confirmed in interviews with meeting planners from a variety of associations and industries, all of whom recently attended the unFAM or a “Hosted Hol- iday Fam” put on by VisitPittsburgh in November.
52 pcma convene February 2011
Why to Go — and When But if fam trips are hard work, and require so much valu- able time out of the office, why does it pay to attend them — in an age when anyone can access reams of hotel and venue information online? For the same reason that face- to-face meetings remain relevant and valuable in this era of videoconferencing. “The best way — and, in the long run, the most cost-
effective way [to make a site-selection decision] — is to see the venue and know what it’s all about,” said Pat Ahaesy, CMP, CSEP, cofounder of the corporate and asso- ciation event-planning firm P&V Enterprises. “The air walls, things that drop off the side of the ceiling, that are not shown in photos, and etc. There’s a lot of that.” Ahaesy added: “I never understood how people just send
out RFPs and take whatever is cheaper—but I guess that’s common now, because people think it’s less expensive. But for the best value, you really need to see that space.” Opportunities to do just that aren’t exactly scarce. Expe-
rienced meeting professionals are accustomed to fielding numerous fam-trip invitations throughout the year. Many of these are politely declined, for reasons ranging from lack of time to knowing that the destination would never seri-