SMM & Venue Security: The Most Important Conversation You're Probably Not Having

Meetings security is a tough topic, especially when both the venue and the planner concentrate on liability instead of the larger goal. The result is a gaping hole in risk management that should keep both parties of the contract up at night. Excellence Squared COO Vicki Hawarden, strategic meetings consultant Betsy Bondurant and Erase security firm president Kevin Mellott talk through the problems and how strategic meetings management efforts can propel better standards and solutions.

BTN: Has awareness of meetings safety and security grown in the past couple years?

Betsy Bondurant: Meetings safety and security has become more and more of a business driver for SMM programs. People certainly want savings and cost avoidance, but they really want that visibility, to know what meetings are taking place and where, and they want that visibility sooner. A client recently told me that security was concerned the company was holding meetings in unsafe locations and they wanted to be able to have input on meeting locations before events are contracted.

BTN: Are corporations working meetings safety and security conversations into the venue sourcing and contracting process?

Bondurant: Many of the more mature SMM programs have worked with their legal department and with the legal department of a chain hotel [to standardize] terms and conditions regarding things like attrition and liability and force majeure and all those clauses that bog the lawyers down each and every time they’re negotiating [a meetings] contract … to create what is often called a master service agreement. Under that agreement, you then start sourcing availability at a particular hotel and negotiate specifics for [an individual] meeting: the availability, rates, meeting space, room block, food and beverage. The interesting part is that most people are not looking at security and risk in those overarching contracts, but I also don’t think they’re looking at it on the individual contracts.

BTN: How do the venues look at their security responsibility toward their clients?

Kevin Mellott: A long time ago, we had the White House conference on travel and tourism. One of the forum topics was safety and security. None of the CEOs agreed as to what their responsibility was to the guests staying there. They all agreed they had some responsibility, but they didn’t agree to what level. Our [security] firm has certain chains that we like to work with because we know their security personnel at their headquarters and they typically can give us a little leverage at the local level. I cannot tell you that when I go out the door, our site inspection is going to be the same for every Marriott or every Wyndham or every Hyatt. Every time we get there, it’s different at the building. The general manager is different. The local fire department capabilities are different. The police department response is different.

BTN: Without standardized internal support for SMM and general agreement from venues, it sounds like meetings safety and security relies on the meeting planner.

Vicki Hawarden: I was a meetings professional for a big chunk of my career. I had my first wake-up call after 9/11, like many people, and remember doing site visits and asking [venues] about how they control access to their HVAC system because there were concerns at that time of spores being thrown out into the air, etc. Half the time people looked at me like I was asking a silly question. I realized then there was not a lot of agreement on what constituted appropriate safety and security measures.

Mellott: [We expect] the meeting planner to perform almost like the intelligence community in the U.S.: The meeting planner has to get it right 100 percent of the time, and a security incident only has to happen once in their career. It’s very problematic.

BTN: At the SMM level, do you see companies at least starting to address this with tools or guidance for meeting organizers?

Bondurant: I’ve seen awareness growing in the past 18 months, but I don’t see a lot of standard questions or vetting in the sourcing process yet. Gaining visibility through SMM into all of an organization’s meetings [could develop] into standard security processes and procedures. For example, policies set out that if you’re planning a meeting in certain higher-risk markets, you have to work with internal risk and security to get it approved. If you are planning a certain type of meeting—for a board of directors—you need to alert risk and security before contracting. Hopefully there is some type of crisis management plan. If they’re a formal meetings management department that has very seasoned planners, they likely will have developed some things.

Mellott: Our most successful programs are when we work with the client’s general legal counsel and we create … a minimal standards performance deal, that every venue we use has to meet these criteria or we have to ship people in to provide resources on site. Once we get that out, then all the planners working in house and the independents working for the corporation are on the same page, at least the basic same page when they go out the door. From my viewpoint, the strategic management side is the only place that you could get a lot of leverage in the big picture going forward to help the individual meeting planners get through this in a safe manner.

BTN: Vicki, you’re working on industry standards for venue security. How is that going?

Hawarden: Part of what I’ve been doing since my [previous role as president and CEO of] the International Association of Venue Managers is working with a group that is focused on creating standards and doing assessments. We’ve been working with the Convention Industry Council’s Apex committee, reaching out to a venue organization in Europe [and having] discussions with a similar group in Mexico. We want to create a standard that is sort of that baseline to be recognized as a secure venue and then [also establish] ways to recognize [venues that] go above and beyond.

BTN: Have you established certain categories of questions at this point? What should organizations prioritize?

Hawarden: We have about 12 elements in the standard, [including] data protection; human resources, how you train people and hire people; health and safety processes; risk management, business continuity. What seems to be "the most important" unfortunately tends to be driven by what’s in the news yesterday. When we had the Ebola breakout, everybody was calling me asking, "How are we controlling our health and safety?" After a flu outbreak, everybody freaks out about contagious illness. [We need to] decide what matters during a calm time, put out the road map for what matters and what’s the priority. We also need to address what’s important for large venues, small venues, big city, small city. Organizations may still wish to do their own due diligence with a private firm or their internal assessment, but [our goal] is to provide a tool that anybody could use: a planner, a venue or a brand or chain. This way, we’re not just reacting to the latest incident.

BTN: To that point, what do organizations need to consider from a business perspective when evaluating a venue or location? No one wants to make reactive business decisions.

Mellott: That inspection or accreditation ultimately comes down to money and the value of the assets being protected. We look at the assets in three groups: human assets, physical assets and intellectual assets. That’s pretty cold-blooded at times, but that’s how we get the C-level to spend big money to address the issues. If the asset exposure is high and the potential value loss is high and likely, and you need to do the meeting because the company is going to make a lot of money on the other side, it becomes a mathematical formula of how much we’re going to spend to stop any silliness from happening. The client can also negotiate cost reduction with the venue based on how many extra security resources they have to bring in. That’s what the CEO cares about and, in my experience, they are often surprised that the company doesn’t already have this in place.

BTN: Is it realistic to think that meeting planners can apply enough pressure to ensure that minimum venue-security standards are applied broadly across the industry?

Mellott: Hotel owners and the heads of the brands have not made really public statements [about security standards]. A couple of CEOs [have told me] they just don’t have the muscle to flex on that from a brand perspective and drive it down to management companies and owners. The only muscle I see is coming from who decides to pay a bill to use the facility.

Hawarden: The question of what the planners are doing is critical. I was a meeting planner when we were trying to push uphill the corporate social responsibility initiative. Venues viewed it as a cost: a barrier, a problem. It was an issue until planners really started to focus on it and say, "No, this really matters to us." Then everybody got onboard because, of course, the customer is driving what really matters to the venue.

BTN: Corporate social responsibility is an interesting comparison. It became a differentiator for many venues, and now it’s table stakes. But CSR is easy to promote because it’s optimistic. The security conversation is more threatening.

Bondurant: People are uncomfortable talking about safety and security. Hotels and venues don’t want to open themselves up to liability or show weaknesses.

Hawarden: They are also a little afraid of letting too much information out because they don’t want people to know what their security plans are. It’s a little peskier.

Mellott: I wish the meetings industry would get behind this the way they got behind recycling plastic bottles. If you look at all the environmental things—the soap in the rooms, not washing the towels every day—if they jumped into safety and security for their own attendees the way they did to protect the planet where their attendees live, we would not have nearly the problems we do.

Hawarden: Nobody thinks it’s fun to talk about safety and security, but it matters. If you’re prepared and you’re focused on it before something like that happens, you’re so much better off than being behind the eight ball, something does happen, and now you’re trying to catch up to it.

BTN: So what’s the first step for strategic meetings managers?

Mellott: Venues and clients need to start looking at this in a different way. Venues can’t view the client in terms of whether they are going to freak out when they bring up security, and clients can’t only think in terms of shifting liability to the venue. They all need to look at this as a partnership in which everyone needs to be legitimately educated and aware and want to know what we’re going to do "in case." Everybody needs to be a realist but not overreact.

Hawarden: It’s important to ask those good questions. If you do nothing else, just ask good questions. Obviously having things in your contract, having really rigorous site visits, all of that matters, but just ask good questions.

Bondurant: Meeting managers can show their value more effectively when they are proactively reaching out to the director of security, IT folks, asking what the concerns should be that we should be looking at venue security and talking to legal. They can’t hide in a corner until someone reaches out to them and then they say, "Oh, I was waiting for you to approach me about it."