“A conference puts all of us on trial; the operator, the airline, the handling agent, the hotel and the country itself.”
I’m at the Amathus Beach Hotel in Paphos, Cyprus. I’m here with a client to put the final touches to a conference for next May. A conference which has been two years in the planning.
We undertake very few conferences. In the 30 years we have been in business you can count the conferences on one hand. We are a tour operator and not a conference organiser. I wonder what the difference is? I often think it’s in the mark up! Dare I say it, but a tour operator’s mark-up is rather less than a conference organiser’s.
No, really, the difference is that we deal with people on holiday, spending their own money while the conference organiser deals with people on business, generally being paid for by their businesses.
We would not organise a conference anywhere we did not know intimately. So I would like to think that, when it comes to putting something together in Cyprus, we can do the job rather differently and, I have no doubt, it will be cheaper because we are just used to lower mark-ups.
Is it because we don’t know how much we can charge that we demand so little or is it because we do not realise how much goes into organising a successful conference?
Like everything else, it’s attention to detail which counts. For two days we have been going through every item, timing every excursion and, together with the person responsible on the client’s part, thinking of all possible mishaps and how they can be avoided.
When you’ve worked with a hotel as long as we have with the Amathus, you know that you just don’t have to worry about the hotel’s ability.
What I want to do is to concentrate on the bits outside the hotel, make Cyprus the most interesting place these people will have ever been to.
This is a group of intellectuals, so the guides have to be more academic. These are people who must have been to hundreds of conferences so the excursions have to be and will be very different, uncovering parts of the island which only we who really love Cyprus know.
Having been through these two days, I can certainly see why conference organisers charge more. For many individuals attending a conference, what goes on and how it is all managed is very important. A good conference can make a career. A poor one always sticks in all the delegates’ minds. So it really does have to go well.
A conference puts all of us on trial; the operator, the airline, the handling agent, the hotel and the country itself. How many times has it happened that we are put off a destination because a conference there has been very badly organised or because the staff in the hotel have not been friendly. To the delegate, unfriendly reception staff at the hotel mean an unfriendly country. No matter how good and efficient the hotel, if the reception isn’t helpful then all is lost. Similarly, tour operators’ reps can make or break an operator in much the same way.
All in all, I can see why conference organising costs what it does.
The co-ordination work involved is enormous. I’m not sure that we would want to get involved in too many!