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Elite Meetings Alliance Daily Digest – Tuesday 1/31

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It’s hard to imagine never having been to an Elite Meetings Alliance before this. Maybe I’m a changed person, maybe I’m enlightened, maybe I’m a little exhausted, but mostly – I am so utterly grateful to be with a company that enjoys what it does as much as it appreciates the people that make the company what it is. Thank you all for coming, for participating, and for creating a [...]

by Alina Itkin on January 31, 2012

Elite Meetings Alliance Daily Digest – Monday 1/30

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Hello again everyone! We hope you had another fabulous day at the Rancho Las Palmas. The sessions were jam packed and full of information. Thank you to Laura Schwartz, Midori Connolly, Daren Martin, & Shawn Seipler! To get the details on them, visit our Michelle Thornton’s blog at the link here. Big appreciative THANK YOU for blogging about us, Michelle! The Trick shot clinic got quite fancy with those shots [...]

by Alina Itkin on January 30, 2012

Elite Meetings Alliance Daily Digest – Sunday 1/29

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Where to start with the yesterday? Well for one, thank you all for coming to the hospitality desk to Shameka & I to check in. You made the process extremely easy and it was great to finally put a face to the all the names we see. If you haven’t already received your name badge, stop on by the hospitality desk today! We’ll be there from 8am-6pm in the Ballroom [...]

by Alina Itkin on January 29, 2012

Broadcasting LIVE Hybrid Sessions from EMA

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Participate in the EMA from Home! We’re here in the desert getting ready to kick off the January Elite Meetings Alliance at Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa and it’s shaping up to be an amazing event! For those of you who weren’t able to be here in person, you’re invited to join us for our Educational Sessions via a live webcast! This will not be your average webcast. Our [...]

by Alina Itkin on January 27, 2012

Inside Scoop to the Elite Meetings Alliance

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Elite Meetings Alliance Details Happy New Year! We hear it’s cold out there, but we’re starting to feel the desert heat as we prepare for the Elite Meetings Alliance (EMA)! If you haven’t already heard, Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa is hosting the EMA January 29-31st in the desert oasis of Rancho Mirage (Palm Springs), California. We have some exciting insider details we’d like to share before you step [...]

by Alina Itkin on January 10, 2012

EliteMeetings.com 4.0 Goes Members Only

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Do you want to be rich, famous, and glamorous? Ride around in a stretch hummer limo and dance the night away with A-list movie stars?! Ah, well …. for that you would have to pay a lot of money and know some good people but great thing you know us here at Elite Meetings! We may not be able to get you into top-secret nightclubs, but we might have something [...]

by Alina Itkin on December 15, 2011

American Airlines Supports its’ Planners

AMR Chapter 11 will not affect the Elite Meetings Alliance (EMA) Like most of you, when AMR, the parent company of American Airlines, announced they had filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 yesterday morning it left me wondering what that meant for our upcoming event, the Elite Meetings Alliance. The film buff in me couldn’t help but conjure images of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life railing [...]

by Margaret Holsinger on December 1, 2011

The Road to the EMA: Keynote Speaker Announced

In our last blog post we told you about Margaret, our resident event planner who is responsible for the planning and execution of the Elite Meetings Alliance at Ranchos Las Palmas Resort & Spa. Since then, our little Margie (don’t tell her we called her that!) has been bustling about signing contracts, locking down speakers, and doing a site visit to Rancho Las Palmas. During her visit, Margaret had the [...]

by Alina Itkin on November 30, 2011

EliteMeetings.com 4.0…Coming soon!

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I’m honestly chomping at the bit to release EliteMeetings.com version 4.0, but the team convinced me that we should wait to launch the new site until its fine tuned and ready for prime time. While I agree we should not launch until all of the new enhancements are complete, I simply can’t wait that long to share the great new look and feel…let alone the time-saving new features incorporated into [...]

by Kelly Foy on November 15, 2011

SpeedRFP reaches 10,000 buyer members!

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I’m very proud to share that the SpeedRFP buyer community reached member # 10,000 today. It is important to point out that to be qualified as a member, they must have submitted at least 1 RFP using the system. If you take in to consideration that each of these members likely plan multiple meetings and events on an annual basis, they represent millions of hotel guests each year. This active [...]

by Kelly Foy on November 3, 2011

The Road to the EMA: Meet Margaret

Here at Elite Meetings our focus is on changing the event planning industry through innovative technologies that understand the market and how it works. The people behind Elite Meetings are passionate, friendly, and majorly quirky. This is where our beloved Event Planner, Margaret Holsinger comes in. With this series of blog posts, we will take you through the journey of bringing to life an Elite Meeting’s Alliance. You’ll gain [...]

by Alina Itkin on October 28, 2011

Hot New Hotels Slated for 2012 Elite Meetings Alliances

Selected hotels seize opportunity to showcase the very best and latest in event offerings. | Highly regarded invitation-only EMA continues to set the standard for one-on-one buyer-seller format. Santa Barbara, CA – October 2011 – Elite Meetings International today announced the sites of next year’s three Elite Meetings Alliances (EMA). CEO Kelly Foy said, “All three of our 2011 events set new records for attendance and performance because we continue [...]

by Bryce Johnson on October 11, 2011

See you at IMEX America!

The team is preparing to head to Las Vegas for the highly anticipated IMEX America, and we hope to see you there. If you plan to attend, drop by the Elite Meetings International booth (#1068) to get a sneak peak of EliteMeetings.com 4.0! In fact, you might even be able to provide a helping hand in developing some of its new features. After all, we built the site for you, [...]

by Kelly Foy on October 5, 2011

How to Assign and Respond to an RFP for Hoteliers

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We’ve recently updated how RFP recipients can manage their RFPs by adding the ability for lead coordinators to assign an RFP to other colleagues. How-to Assign an RFP for Hoteliers: To best incorporate SpeedRFP into your workflow, we’ve built “Assign RFP,” which allows a hotelier to assign an RFP they’ve received to a colleague, prompting them to respond. Here’s how to assign an RFP: View the incoming RFP by clicking [...]

by Martha Brooks on August 24, 2011

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The Power of Print? Don’t believe what you hear, its still in demand!

We recently announced that meeting planners will be able to pick up a copy of Elite Meetings magazine at major airport newsstands, and this week I received confirmation that our presence on airport newsstands is a huge success. In fact, we received a reorder today from Hudson News for Houston area airports, which indicates that Elite Meetings magazine is selling well. That was music to my ears! This news is [...]

by Kelly Foy on July 15, 2011

SpeedRFP…its Popping Up Everywhere!

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I started out my day today wondering just how many hotels are now capable of receiving SpeedRFPs, and was very pleasantly surprised when I learned planners can now use SpeedRFP to submit eRFPs to nearly 3,000 hotels worldwide. It seems that every day we see a handful of new hotels and resort adopting this time-saving technology, and we see exponential growth on the horizon. Our objective when creating SpeedRFP was [...]

by Kelly Foy on June 21, 2011

Spring Elite Meetings Alliance Sees Record Numbers

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With over 1193 one-on-one appointments being scheduled through FaceTime Appointment Scheduler, the Elite Meetings Alliance at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas was our largest event to date. Cate DeLaRosa of Ameriprise Financial said, “The networking and one-on-ones were fantastic and of the 16 meeting I had, I will very likely book with five of them in the future.” Praise for the event came in from suppliers and buyers alike. Kris [...]

by Carol Lynch on May 18, 2011

Experienced Planners Share Tips

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A favorite of each Elite Meetings Alliance is the knowledge-sharing. The meeting planners attending are a wealth of experience. Here are a couple of the favorite tips I heard during the EMA: Carolyn Pund says Cisco encourages attendee loyalty at their big annual conference by creating an exclusive ideas/networking lounge that’s only available to those who actively contribute and have attended for 5 consecutive years–miss a year, start over! The [...]

by Bryce Johnson on May 5, 2011

Elite Meetings Alliance Kicks Off!

Kelly Foy, CEO of Elite Meetings International, welcomed 90+ meeting planners and 76 hotels to The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas for the Spring 2011 Elite Meetings Alliance. Setting out the event’s theme, “It’s about time!” , Kelly asserted “It’s about time our industry is recognized for its contributions to the recovering economy; it’s about time–and good to see–that the US government is promoting meeting and incentive travel…Saving time is what [...]

by Bryce Johnson on May 2, 2011

The Origins of FaceTime Appointment Scheduler

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Meeting professionals and show managers are on a nonstop quest to find efficiency and value for their events. Everyone knows that face-to-face meetings help develop relationships and initiate business partnerships. However, time and financial constraints make one-on-one meetings nearly impossible to organize and track without a savvy system. When we launched our Elite Meetings Alliance events in 2006, we quickly learned how time-consuming it was to keep track of our [...]

by Carol Lynch on April 27, 2011

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