GLASS ACT: The Ottawa Convention Centre (OCC)—pic- tured here before its signature curved glass “skin” was laid on—looks out over the Rideau Canal and Parliament Hill. “It’s glistening and new, ... and that real- ly drew us in,” said Kara Dzikowski, executive secretary for fellowship services for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada.
meetingplanners use their contract (or contracts) in situations such as these to spell out just what will happen if, say, worse comes to worst, and the facility does not get built in time. WOCN, for example, has special language put into its con-
tracts specifying that the group will receive its deposit back —and get reimbursed for any marketing expenditures they may have incurred—if the center isn’t ready in time. “I also put in our hotel contracts,” Maines said, “that if the center is not going to be done, then the hotel contracts would be null and void.” (See “Contract Language,” p. 58.) Donella Evoniuk, senior director of conference services for
the International Society forTechnology in Education (ISTE), pursued a similar strategy when booking her 20,000-attendee meeting at Philadelphia’s significantly expanded Pennsylva- nia Convention Center this past June. “The strategy we use,” Evoniuk said, “is to always build into all contracts [the right to cancel] in the future, should the facility not manifest the wayweforecast.” Furthermore, Evoniuk booked ISTE’s 2011 meeting as part of a multiyear agreement, which specified that,
IF THEY DON’T BUILD IT: Debi Maines, CMP, director of meetings for theWound, Ostomy, and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN), makes sure to account for a new facility not being completed on time in both her convention-center and hotel contracts.
should her group have a bad experience the first year it used the expansion, it would have a window of time in which to pull its future bookings. Beyond simply reserving the right to cancel should the facil-
ity not be completed on time—or, more conservatively, not meet certain specified “mile markers” in terms of construc- tion progress—Kara Dzikowski, executive secretary for fel- lowship services for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAC), recommends getting down to a granular level of detail in your contract language. In October 2010, PAC booked its General Conference 2012 at the new Ottawa Convention Center (OCC)—which, when the group visited in Febru- ary 2010, was just “a great big hole in the ground,” Dzikowski said. “There maybe was a crane set up.” PAChad to rely on artists’ concepts and renderings of the
building to make a decision. “We looked at their drawings and their layouts—which do say ‘subject to change,’ but you figure, OK, how much could it change?” Dzikowski said. “And now we’re lookingat a situation where the main hall that we booked, months later I see the final drawings, and the capacities have changed significantly.” As a result, PACwill be unable to fit all its exhibitors into
one room at OCC — because the room, Dzikowski said, decreased in size by 30 percent from the original capacity pre- sented in the plans. “Now we have to go into the hallway,” she said. “It’s definitely a monkey wrench.” For that reason, Dzikowski recommends writing into the contract if you require specific dimensions, square footage, or capacity.
Financial Incentives, or Lack Thereof The idea for this article was initially sparked by something a planner said to Convene this past April, at OCC’s grand opening celebration. She mentioned that it might be inter-