Leave Nothing to Chance on Your Next Site Visit 

As more states relax and revise the restrictions imposed during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, we will see more rescheduling and rebooking of the canceled meetings and events from the last year. 

A great tool to utilize for the distribution of your RFPs, as you search for and contract with the perfect venue is HopSkip.

It’s great news that the hospitality industry is rebounding; however, coming together face-to-face dictates that planners be prepared and fully assured that all the attendees feel safe and secure within the selected venue. That will require meeting planners to perform more due diligence than ever during the site visit and inspection process.

I’ve been a meeting planner for 20-plus years and have conducted hundreds of site visits. It’s my duty, just like yours, to look for and find the best and most appropriate venues for the programs our clients entrust us to plan and produce on their behalf. We must ask questions and receive responses that give us confidence in the hotels we consider and source for the programs.

Several years ago, I created a standard site visit questionnaire for the programs I was sourcing for pharmaceutical and medical device programs. It’s six pages long and covers much territory, and out of necessity, I recently updated it to focus on the new issues and concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19.

Ideally, the hotels that you ask these questions should provide you with responses before the site visit. One of the conveniences of utilizing HopSkip as a sourcing tool is that a lot of the information can be challenging to find on the public websites of these hotels, HopSkip has a lot of the information available to you as you begin your hotel search process. As a planner, one of the features available to you is the ability to ask questions upfront during the RFP process so that when you receive your proposals from the hotels, you also receive answers to all of the questions you asked, waiting in your dashboard, nice, neat, and organized. As a bonus, we can even compare hotels' answers to our questions side by side!

It’s also helpful if you have time to review and familiarize yourself with the responses before you walk and review the property. We must leave nothing to chance and have assurance from our hotel partners that we have made the best possible decision and have confidence in the venue selected for the program.

Feel free to download a copy of my questionnaire and use it for your upcoming site visits. You can tailor it to fit your needs based on the type of programs you are planning, but this gives you a great head start.

Template

167 questions to ask during your next site visit

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Once you select a hotel and begin to plan your event, I suggest keeping a copy of the completed questionnaire in your notebook or digital file. Many pieces of information on the questionnaire will be helpful as you detail your program, and it’s a handy document to refer to during the planning process. Now, more than ever, we must help each other keep the hospitality industry strong and thriving.

The author is the owner of Kite Meeting Management, a premier meeting planning agency created and built with 20 years of hands-on experience as a corporate planner of internal meetings, external user conferences, incentives, board meetings, pharmaceutical investigator programs, symposia, world congresses, and tradeshows, both domestically and internationally.

Kite Meetings is your visibility expert, working hand-in-hand to create and develop themes, designs, content, registration websites, videos, and your go-to to procure the perfect gifts and swag for the event. Kite Meetings is aiming higher and going farther every single time. Visit our website at www.kitemeetings.com and allow us to reduce your stress while elevating your event to the next level of excellence.