READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL: The Omni Mandalay Hotel in Irving, Texas,
hosted the Green Bay Packers during the week of the Super Bowl — while the Omni Fort Worth hosted the Pittsburgh Steelers. To find out what the two properties’ general managers thought of the experience, see p. 19.
PLENARY
ASHES, ASHES: The civil-aviation indus- try is learning what it can from last year’s eruption.
The Volcano, One Year Later
M
JAPAN UPDATE
For updates on the Japan earthquake, visit Convene’s blog at http:// pcmaconvene .blogspot.com.
ENTION THE ERUPTION OF ICELAND’S Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which last April grounded thousands of flights in northern Europe for more than a week and left hundreds of meeting attendees and speakers stranded on both sides of the Atlantic, and the stories still come tumbling out.
“It was chaos,” said Behroz Daroga, CMP, president of New York City–based MEC (Meetings Events Communication), who was with about 200 clients attending an interna- tional medical conference in Vienna when the eruption began. Half of Daroga’s clients were Italian, and Daroga managed to bus them to Trieste, Italy, just over the Austrian border, where flights were waiting to take them home.
The American members of her group weren’t so fortunate. A determined few hired taxis to drive hundreds of miles to catch flights in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.
Could there be anything more aggravat- ing than the desperate scramble for ground transportation or hotel rooms and then, after days of waiting, for rebooked flights? Maybe this: finding out after the fact that some of the cancellations may not have been neccessary. At the Atlantic Conference on Eyjafjal- lajökull and Aviation, held last September in Iceland, experts argued that the massive closure of air space was a result of institutional failure as well as natural disaster. “The kind of knowledge and expertise needed to manage continued on page 18
pcma convene April 2011 15
News and notes for the meetings and conventions industry