In 2008, when Debi Maines, CMP, director of meetings for the Wound, Ostomy, and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN), and senior meeting manager withAssociation Headquarters,booked WOCN’s June 2010 meetingat the Phoenix Convention Center’s West Building, the facility was little more than “a hole in the ground,” she said. So, Maines did what she could in terms of evaluatingwhether
the forthcoming building—which replaced the center’s original North Building—wouldbeable toaccommodateher group,which typicallydrawsbetween2,000and2,500 nurses for its annualcon- ference.“I didgooutandsee the hole in the ground,in addition to renderingsandfloor plans,”she said.“Iknewfrom that that itwas going to be a good fit.”
According to Plan That’s among the first rules when you’re booking space at an unfinished convention center, hotel, or other facility: Learn everything you can—in person and on paper. In the case of the Phoenix meeting,Maineswasn’t greatly concerned about the building being ready, because it was slated to be finished in 2009, an entire year before the 2010WOCNmeeting was scheduled. Similarly, an upcoming WOCN conference, tentatively planned for Nashville’s under-construction Music City Center, will have roughly the same amount of lead time between the center’s opening (scheduled for March 2013) and when the meeting will take place, in June 2014. Maineswentintoabitmoredetail about eval-
uatingMusic City Center. “I definitely look at the floor plans tomake sure themeeting space that they’re proposing is going to be big enough for whatwe need for breakouts and general sessions,” she said. “I look at where the exhibit hall is going to be, in relation to all of our other meeting space, [and] look at where the docks are going to be.” This past May, Dallas Comic Con founder Ben Stevens
Center ended up being “very positive,” he found that “there were some ceilings that were lower thanexpected on the upper level, andwehad allocated some big things in those rooms and had to adjust for that,” he said. “There were some rooms that didn’t exist.They wereonthe diagram,but youknowhowdia- grams are—they just got changed during the building process. Andparking was significantly less thanweoriginally expected, considering the size of the building.” Stevens advises other planners in his posi-
C M P CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE
brought his showto the new Irving ConventionCenter at Las Colinas — opened in January 2011 — in Irving, Texas. Stevens also pored over floor plans and architectural draw- ings before booking the building; but, as he discovered, in real life things aren’t always built exactly the way they appear on paper. While Stevens’ overall experience at the Irving Convention
46 pcma convene October 2011
tion to get as many details as possible. “The ceiling height might have been available to me, as a number on some page, somewhere,” he said.“When you look at the size of that room, you would just naturally expect that it would have higher ceilings. But that’s not always the case. Don’t assume anything.” As it turned out, the lower ceiling was chal- lenging for DallasComic Con, as was parking
—probably the No. 1 issue for the show’s attendees, accord- ing to Stevens.“We gridlocked the city,” he said. “Cars were everywhere with nowhere to park.” Stevens conceded that the parking issue wasn’t really the facility’s fault, however. Last but not least: “Be flexible,” Stevens said, echoing
many other meeting planners interviewed for this article. “If you can be flexible, your life’s a lot easier.”
Contractual Obligations The best way to handle unexpected occurrences when book- ing an as-yet-unrealized convention center is, of course, through your contract. In additionto standard contract language, savvy