Luxury Hotels Sizzle With Added Value For Biz Travelers

Whether looking to provide convening executives with something extra when their meetings let out, such as spa dates, golf tournaments, tours of world-class cities, five-star cuisine--or all of the above, planners should take note of fresh options among luxury hotels for meetings and incentives as the summer heat descends.

These properties deliver value by offering atypical environments, superior service and amenities. Far from resting on their laurels in this seller's market, luxury hotels want to continue their good fortunes by offering packages that mix out-of- the-ordinary attributes with the now standard "virtual office" environment.

"What I think we're seeing is the culmination of the merging in recent years of a resort and business class hotel," said George Schwab, president of the GDS Inc., an international hotel marketing and consulting firm in Garden City, New York.

"Executives are so busy, they are trying to tack on mini-vacations to their business meetings whenever they can. They also are trying to live healthier lives, really wanting to be able to eat better cuisine and work out after the meetings break for the day. All of this gets reflected in the offerings at hotels." Schwab, who markets the Interlaken, Switzerland-based Victoria Jungfrau Resort and Spa, said that business has picked up in the past several months as the distinction between resort and corporate hotel continues to blur.

Add to this the never-ending planning challenge of finding a new venue for well-traveled groups, and you get an environment dotted with increasingly opulent and interesting properties.

Despite all the press that hotels have gotten for being firm on price, luxury properties are trying to soften the blow of a high-rate market by offering the very best program support.

Corporate travelers and meeting attendees can accomplish serious work in the boardroom--and convene after the meeting for compelling diversion on the links or around town--in a newly built Four Seasons resort opening in Carlsbad, Calif., this summer.

The resort, opening this July, promises to be a cut above the typical corporate or resort hotel by mixing productive and alluring features of both.

With its ocean views, proximity to the Batiquitos Lagoon wildlife preserve and an Arnold Palmer-designed 18-hole golf course (not to mention nearby San Diego, La Jolla and Del Mar) the resort already is culling impressive bookings from financial, insurance and high-tech companies. Some firms already have snapped up space for the year 2000.

The 331-room resort features Spanish Colonial-style architecture, two great restuarants and an upscale club house. "This is the first luxury resort built in southern California in 12 years. Everyone is quite excited to have another alternative that offers so many options for incentive and business meetings," said director of marketing Jim Samuels, who noted that 11 massage treatment rooms for wraps, facials and other health-inducing treatments top off the usual sauna, steam rooms and exercise equipment.

Renown stylist Jose Eber will open an in-hotel unisex styling salon, another service the hotel is offering to differentiate itself.

Samuels, a member of Meeting Professionals International and former marketing director for the Four Seasons Hotel Newport Beach, Ritz Carlton Rancho Mirage, and director of sales and marketing for Ritz Carlton Laguna Nigel, knows that increasingly planners want a half-day of interesting group programming or individual leisure options to complement the business meeting.

"We've designed a hotel that can accommodate both our leisure and corporate markets. Someone coming in for a business meeting stays in one part of the building, so that they can experience that sense of team-building and the rest of our guests don't feel alienated. Meanwhile, the corporate traveler can get the best of being in a resort and a well-equipped business hotel."

Four Seasons built its meeting space to planner specifications, raising the bar on tech support to accommodate laptops and sophisticated presentation tools and the ceiling in the ballrooms by some 4,000 feet.

Audiovisual equipment includes: lecterns with light and sound control, overhead projectors, LCD color display panels, slide projectors, multi-image dissolve units and programs, video cameras, projectors and players, microphones, mixers, amplifiers, audio cassette players, CD players, personal computers and peripherals, with on-site support to keep glitches to a minimum.

The property also features a business library, virtual offices in the guest rooms, two ballrooms at 12,000 and 4,000 square feet, respectively, along with a 2,300 square-foot conference facility, and eight additional meeting rooms for executive board meetings or breakout sessions.

At the Hilton Cavalieri in Rome, the recent completion of $45 million in renovations along with the installation of a 20,000-foot health and fitness center and spa--in addition to having the Pergola Roof, one of top-rated restaurants in the eternal city--make the hotel a magnet for meetings business, said the hotel's general manager Hans Fritz.

The spa has a facility dubbed the TechnoGym, and two other spaces allotted for a mix of activities that include yoga, aerobics, Thai Chi, Jazzercise and total body conditioning. For those who want to lounge as the Romans do while not in the board room, there is also a sumptuous Turkish spa, hydro massage, exclusive La Prairie facials and access to physicians that can offer advice on everything from a better diet and exercise program to the best corrective procedures to undertake for plastic surgery.

"We do more meetings than any other facility in Rome," said Fritz. "The groups that visit here receive nothing but absolutely superb service." Two planners told BTN that the Cavalieri, with its own prop department, goes that extra yard to ensure a successful program.

Diane View, manager of special services at Met Life Resources, a division of the insurance company located in San Pedro, Calif., said the three-day program In Rome was so successful that she would consider returning. "Of course the hotel and city were stunning. We had a tour of all the major attractions on the first day. One night, after a half-day spent touring various museums we rented out an entire restaurant and had a karaoke party, which everyone liked. But what impressed me most from a planning perspective was how absolutely present senior management was. They were always poking their heads in to ask if I needed help," View said.

Jean Kinney, corporate meetings and incentive travel manager for Phillips 66, the Bartlesville, Okla., petroleum company, featured Rome as part of complicated incentive itinerary to reward branded marketers that included a post-meeting trip to Salerno. What could have been a planning nightmare was surprisingly tenable, and, Kinney said, a destination that might be considered too expensive was surprisingly affordable.

"I would say that you got real value for dollar. This wasn't an inexpensive venture by any means but I got what I paid for." She agreed that management was extremely helpful and also liked the idea that onsite props simplified planning. "I had 100 rooms in my block and had gift deliveries as part of my program, which the staff handled expertly. Despite the long distance, planning was very smooth. I never felt shuffled along."

Sweetening Paris

Another sterling city, Paris, can be a haven for groups who want to add culture, and some diversity to their meeting or incentive itinerary. The Hotel Sofitel is sweetening the pot by co-marketing each of its ten properties based there and offering corporations that want to leverage business between multiple properties discounts, subject to negotiation.

"We wanted to market the hotels together so that corporations that rely on one property in Paris understand there are other options in our collection--a property in a better part of town or with a better atmosphere for their particular gathering," said Nicolas Ricat, senior vice president of brand marketing.

The largest meeting hotel, the Sofitel Paris Forum Rive Gauche, is located on the Left Bank, and houses a conference center that can seat 1,200. Fifty-one fully adaptable function rooms also are available. Meanwhile the Sofitel Paris Porte De Sevres, is in the new Paris business center of the 15th District close to the Paris Exhibition Centre, Paris Heliport, Issy les Moulineaux and Boulogne.

Emphasizing that Sofitel has no cookie cutter properties in Paris, or for that matter, in the entirety of their collection of 110 deluxe hotels throughout Europe, Ricat said secretarial support, a concierge dedicated to business travelers and another single point person who is designated to aid meeting planners, along with sophisticated audiovisual equipment, are as common in the luxury properties as stunning interiors.

"About 70 percent of our clientele is business travelers, a significant percentage of our business can be attributed to meetings. We understand how to service that market and still offer the very best in an upscale resort experience.