The International Association of Conference Centers soon will begin inspecting its member properties to ensure adherence with the association's mandated criteria for membership. The move is part of an overall association push to strengthen both the conference center concept and the differentiation between such properties and hotels, IACC's new president said.
Geoff Lawson, general manager of the IBM Palisades Executive Conference Center in New York, last month began a two-year term as president of IACC. The board of directors and advisors to the association, which holds its annual conference from March 29 to April 2 in Banff, Alberta, in January met to update its strategic plan. Though the actual details still are being fine-tuned, according to Lawson, several initiatives are imminent.
IACC plans to expand its resources to enhance membership through additional education, training and professional development, Lawson said, including developing and enhancing new, specific educational programming.
The association also is seeking to heighten awareness of its name and the conference center concept through additional marketing.
Perhaps the most striking change will be IACC's decision to retain a standards-management firm to rigorously inspect member properties to determine its compliance to membership criteria, said IACC executive vice president Tom Bolman. The goal, he said, is to strengthen conference center arguments that their properties are more conducive to corporate meetings and training than a typical hotel. Previously, properties would police themselves after they were accepted for association membership.
"This is about strengthening the differentiation between conference centers and hotels," Bolman said. "We want an unbiased, third-party firm to inspect our member properties and recommend their frailties to the board. We want monitoring to move past self-auditing."
Bolman hopes that a quarter of IACC centers will be inspected annually, meaning all member properties will be inspected within four years. Existing members will not be exempt from new or future criteria.
However, Bolman pointed out relatively few properties currently are noncompliant—less than 10 percent—"but a lot of little things can add up," he said.
The association in 2002 revised its criteria to ensure that member properties' per-attendee, per-night complete meeting package pricing includes LCD projectors in at least the main meeting room and specifically defines the styles, sizes and measurements of acceptable tables and chairs and meeting rooms.
The moves come as conference centers increasingly feel competition from hotels seeking a larger share of a smaller pie of corporate meeting business, including from some hotels that offer conference center-style CMP pricing
(Meetings Today, Sept. 24, 2001)."We feel corporate meeting buyers are confused when they see the term 'hotel and conference center,' and we see them encroaching into the marketplace," Lawson said.
Lawson's conference center, which is owned by Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp. and managed by Dolce International of Montvale, N.J., has maintained a healthy level of meetings business from sources outside its corporate parent. IBM accounts for about 40 percent of the center's business, Lawson said, a percentage that has declined steadily in recent years. "Our non-IBM business is healthy," Lawson said. "Mostly, it's made up of major corporations holding facilitated training programs of up to a week long."