A funny, too-familiar video to start your day:
Sh*t Meeting Planners Say
April 30th, 2012Incentive travel is back!
November 3rd, 2011They say everything in life comes down to timing. We launched StaffReservations in July of 2008 with high hopes. Just three months later, incentive travel would grind to a virtual halt. AIG’s relatively small incentive program for independent resellers of its insurance products became a symbol of corporate greed. As the economy sputtered, the travel & meetings industry sputtered along with it. It was hard to get planners to even try StaffReservations, even with free accounts during our beta period. Slowly though, things have been getting better –when you see a discussion of the industry’s health in a mainstream outlet (read: not one of our niche publications), it’s a good bet that the space has recovered. Signups here at StaffRes are starting to pick up as well.
According to this article from USA TODAY:
“Incentive travel is showing the fastest rate of growth in all group business,” Benson says, adding that the resort sold about 200,000 group room nights this year vs. 146,000 a year ago.
You can read the whole article at: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/story/2011-09-05/Reward-travel-for-employees-makes-a-comeback/50266110/1
Check out the new search page
February 23rd, 2010At long last you can search by skill and skill level! Need a PowerPoint Ninja? Someone Fluent in French? They’re easy to find now. Search your favorites, your friends favorites, or the whole database if you like!
Stay tuned…searching by your custom questions & answers is coming soon along with some other cool features.
Some optimism, at last
January 29th, 2010Well, we were overdue for some good news for a change!
The Incentive Research Foundation’s survey of travel buyers, planners, and other industry folks to gauge interest in incentive travel for 2010 shows reason to be “cautiously optimistic,” with a third reporting that their ability to plan incentive travel events has improved significantly.
Get more of the results at Incentive Magazine’s site: http://www.managesmarter.com/msg/content_display/incentive/merchandise/e3idbd92851d6a66e355ad35b628b2e09f5
Almost Famous – SR mentioned in MPI magazine
April 19th, 2009StaffReservations got some nice press this month in MPI’s One+ magazine!
You can see the digital edition here if you don’t already get the print edition.
Thanks MPI!
Overdue new feature: see your colleagues’ events
January 13th, 2009By popular demand — event planners can now see their colleagues’ events as well.
By default, the My Events page will show you the events you’re running — now you’ll see a toggle that will show you all the events at your company and who’s planning them, ordered by date.
Enjoy!
2009 arrives with two big new items
January 6th, 2009We’re getting 2009 going with a bang with two big announcements: Public Profiles and open registration for event planners.
First, let’s talk about Public Profiles. This is a terrific new feature that allows TDs to have a public link to their schedule and profile.
If your name is… Richard Pryor, for example, you can have a link to your profile page that looks like:
www.staffreservations.com/public/RichardPryor
You can send this link to any planner you work with. They can bookmark it and anytime they want to check your schedule they can go to your page. Planners don’t have to sign in — they don’t even need an account at all! Feel free to add this link to your Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or LinkedIn pages.
Of course, this is an optional step. We’ve left it turned off by default to respect your privacy. To turn it on, log in to the site and then go to My Account. You’ll see a new field called Public Profile Name. In most cases you can just type your name (no spaces please, and upper/lowercase doesn’t matter) and then click the Update Account button. Presto! Your new public page is ready to go! If you ever change your mind, just blank the field and your public page will vanish.
The other big news is open registration for event planners. We’ve opened up the site so that any event planner can now register for a free beta account with five seats. That means any of the planners you work with now have an even bigger reason to check us out! Spread the news — the more users we have the better the site will get.
We hope you think public profiles are as cool as we do, and keep spreading the word to the event planners you work with!
Best wishes for a great (and busy!) 2009!
=StaffReservations=
Media disconnect
March 28th, 2009You know it’s bad when even travel writers are jumping on the bandwagon like Rob Lovitt of MSNBC in his self-serving piece last month. This scattershot screed seems to blame the automakers and Las Vegas builders for the rash of cancelled programs of late.
The industry in general hasn’t done a very good job of defending incentive travel. While some clients have nixed programs for cash flow issues, far more have done it in fear of an AIG-like backlash. The truth is that there are plenty of companies out there who have nothing to do with the current financial disaster who know the value of incentive travel: retention of the most successful people in the organization. That’s the message that needs to get out, and sadly it’s been buried in all the “worst crisis since the Great Depression” meme that we can’t seem to get away from.
Hopefully, sites likes Meetings Mean Business and the Meeting Industry Crisis Center can make a dent in all the negative publicity. Do your part!
Tags: cancelled programs, economy, The Industry
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