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February 2008 Article

Rate That Hotel

Surveys show that the industry trend is toward more meetings and bigger meetings, but limited budgets, John Iwaniec, creator of MeetingsCollaborative.com, reports. What’s more, with so much emphasis on ROI these days, planners are being held to more rigorous assessments of their effectiveness.

So to help the busy meeting professional make more efficient use of their time, John has created this new tool that can be a short cut to decision making.

John is quick to point out that his site differs from most others in that it is completely free and all the resources on the site are available to everyone who registers, the only requirement.

His vision for the site is to

• Share information
• Enable collaboration
• Collect and organize problem-solving resources.

The MeetingsCollaborative website will start with hotel ratings and build up to other services. At launch this month, you’ll find 1,200 hotels in North America listed by city or by alphabet it you prefer. For each hotel you are invited to rate it on three criteria, using a 1 to 5 scale where 5 is the highest.

• Overall, I was satisfied with my recent meeting experience at this hotel.
• If the hotel was suitable for a future program, I would use this hotel again.
• I would recommend this hotel to other meeting professionals or colleagues.

John has included ample space for comments so you can share with your peers more specific praise or concerns. Perhaps the meeting space was wonderful, but the guests rooms a little worn. Or maybe it’s a hint on dealing with the staff or about places of interest nearby.

Within each hotel rating listing will be a link to more detailed information about the hotel and its amenities along with photos and a map.

Soon John plans to include international hotels with a goal of having 15,000 listings from worldwide sites.

In a survey taken by The Event Insider about a year ago, readers were asked how they most often checked out hotels. Coming in second to actual site visits was “advice from others who have been there.” The new collaborative website dovetails nicely with planners’ expressed use of advice from others they trust in the industry.

Also on the website, meetings professionals will be invited to rate technology services used in their business ranging from registration programs to audience polling, from badge making to contract management, from marketing to room diagramming.

Other sections of the site will include a Discussion Forum, Articles of Interest, News Feeds, and Links. “My goal is to make this the ultimate portal site for meetings professionals, a place to come for help with anything they need and a place to help others by sharing their experiences.”

With a background in finance, John says he was an early adopter of computer technology. Once he discovered the computerized spreadsheet, he never used an eraser again, he says. A veteran of more than 20 years in knowledge capture, he has developed similar collaborative sites for other groups including those in real estate, and a particularly poignant one for those seeking to recover valuable works of art that disappeared or changed hands during the course of the Holocaust.

Now, for that last hotel you visited and the one before and the one before, here’s where you can rate them www.meetingscollaborative.com.