Did you attend MPI’s World Education Congress in Vancouver? If you did, your days were likely packed with great presentations by industry speakers, fabulous meet and greets in the exhibit area, and just an all-around sense that the meetings industry is back on track again. Vancouver is one of my favorite places, and they played an excellent host of the event. I’m certain Vancouver made quite an impression on everyone, and their beautiful city will see an influx of business as a direct result of hosting WEC.
Personally, I spent my days at the exhibit hall giving web tutorials of Elite Meetings’ products – EliteMeetings.com, SpeedRFP, and FaceTime Appointment Scheduler – making new friends, and reconnecting with many familiar faces. This was MPI’s last exhibiting tradeshow, but they sure went out with a bang. I can honestly say that the exhibit days were 2 of the best I’ve ever spent at any show. We were so busy, I did not even have an opportunity to walk the floor to visit the other booths until the last 10 minutes of the exhibit hours on Monday.
This trip also reinforced the value of Twitter. There was non-stop chatter on the hashtag #WEC10, and I can personally vouch that Twitter contributed to a significant amount of the booth traffic from those who saw our tweets. If you were at the show, we hope you followed your way to the green balloons to learn more about SpeedRFP, our universal RFP system that powers EliteMeetings.com and many other sites. We are very proud of this new tool and are even more excited that it is being adopted so quickly by planners and hoteliers alike. For meeting professionals, it’s a fast, free and easy tool to reduce the amount of re-keying that comes with a typical RFP. It also allows you to track all the responses in one spot, and even gives you the ability to message back and forth with the hotel.
For hoteliers, we are very excited that the MeetingBroker integration will soon be complete, and that so many chains, consortiums and independent hotels have chosen to add SpeedRFP to their websites. Downloading the SpeedRFP form creates instantaneous compliance by APEX, and planners become APEX compliant simply by filling it out. The result puts everyone on the same page, and makes the RFP process much easier. Check out the latest APEX compliant hotels that have added the SpeedRFP form on their websites here.
For those of you who participated in the hosted buyer program, you got to see firsthand the new enhancements to Elite Meetings’ own FaceTime Appointment Scheduler. Among these additions, we added the ability to export your appointments, so now your schedule can live on your laptop, desktop, or mobile device’s calendar. If you want to learn all about the new enhancements, read more here.
Lastly, I’d like to give a special thanks to the team from Maui Jim. They joined us in the booth, and we gave away Maui Jim Sunglasses to meeting professionals who took time to view a short web tour of Elite Meetings and SpeedRFP. Their team is always so great to work with, and their participation in our booth created quite the buzz. From the second the show doors opened until 11:30 on the 2nd day of the show, we had lines of attending planners waiting to take a web tour so they could pick up their new shades. If you didn’t have a chance to stop by our booth or go to the show, we’d still love to give you a web tutorial. To sign up for a personal tutorial, click here.
Cheers to the MPI team for putting on such a great show. This was the highest quality group of meeting professionals I have come across at these shows. Although I am sad to see this tradeshow go, I am excited about MPI’s partnership with IMEX America, which is certain to be an outstanding event.
by on July 29, 2010
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Great Blog and glad it was successful – wish I could have been there!