Unconventional meetings
Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group’s innovative meetings concept, “Experience Meetings” for its Radisson Blu brand, hopes to provide successful meetings with the Brain Box and Brain Food concepts.
Experience Meetings would provide an atmosphere beyond the traditional meeting room settings. They have been designed in order to merge the casual atmosphere with serious corporate environment. They create an ideal environment for all types of small meetings and conferences where innovative and creative thinking is paramount. In Asia Pacific, there are 45 Radisson Blu hotels in operation and another 34 under development.
Telling us more about the concept, Sandy Russell, Vice President, Commercial Operations, Asia Pacific, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, said, “This is the result of a lot of research we have done over a period of time, to try and find out what could we do that would differentiate us from our competitors. The concept would also impact the outcome of the meetings.”
Talking about the Brain Box concept, she explained, “Brain Box speaks to the set-up for the meeting room. We have designed Brain Box to impact the way people learn. There are four distinct learning styles: Kinesthetic, auditory, visual and tactile. We have addressed all four types of learning styles; with the type of furniture, the comfortable flexible seating, the bright colours, with the things that we offer in the meeting rooms — such as the canvases or the white boards that we line the rooms with.”
She adds, “People who need to write things can use the white boards. Auditory people respond mostly to sound, they are impacted by sound. That’s how they remember it. So you will always find, at an Experience Meeting, the finest quality of sound equipment. The audio part of audio visual will always be the best quality. That will help put those people who learn through auditory into the best possible state. We have come up with a playlist of appropriate music, to play in the background that is designed to spark creativity. That is one component of meetings.”
The new team that has taken over the Managing Committee for IATA Agents Association of India (IAAI) Maharashtra Chapter recently is already in the thick of things. The team, led by Chetan Momaya as president of Maharashtra Chapter, IAAI, is in intense discussions with the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) to bring down the number of licenses that travel agencies in Mumbai need to acquire.
The Experience Meetings concept would impact the outcome of business meetings
Momaya said, “We have been talking to MCGM and have already shared our suggestions to tackle some of the issues that we travel agents are having with them. One of them is the number of licenses that agencies need to operate. We have requested them to make it a single-window license system for us. Currently, agencies go through a lot of problems as they need a number of licenses including labour license, performance license, Provident Fund, medical and women’s cell for medium to big companies.”
The new team, that has been elected for a two- year tenure, will also approach Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation. “We want to request them to improve the experience for our clients – provide more and better guides, introduce water activities, improve infrastructure for cruise liners at the passenger port, and not delay MTDC’s hop- on hop- off bus service,” Momaya adds.