A Site Visit is a Must

I have been a Certified Meeting Professional long enough to have run events in venues where I had the opportunity to do a site visit and others where I have not. Which ones do you think went better? Correct, the ones where I was able to lay my eyes on the place myself. There’s no substitute for seeing a venue in-person. No amount of description, photographs, measurements, or videos can relay that certain something you pick up when you stand in the space and take in the sights.

Take a recent experience I had for example. I didn’t have time to make a site visit and our decision was narrowed down between two properties. It was like that home buying show where people narrow down a decision on the home they will choose to live in to three options but none are perfect; house A has a pool and a garage but it’s not in the right neighborhood, house B is in the right neighborhood and has the garage but no pool, and house C makes you think the realtor wasn’t listening at all.

I did what I could to read reviews, scour pictures, review room capacity charts, and more. A group from the cold Midwest was looking to have a small meeting at a warm property on the Gulf coast of a Southern ocean state in January. For me it came down to customer service. The less expensive property inland from the ocean offered great customer service but no ocean views. The more expensive property on a peninsula in the ocean with spectacular views offered terrible customer service. I had to chase that CSM down repeatedly to get answers. We took a team vote and the majority decided on the one on the ocean. I should have gone with my gut.

The on-site experience was much like my pre-event experience. There was no on-site contact person available so I was constantly bothering the front desk, or any random employee walking by, for what we needed. The property was definitely showing its age and the effects of the salt water. The pool next to the ocean with the great views (a selling point for the team), including the adjacent activity area, was always in the shade so you couldn’t sit pool-side, let alone use the pool, until very late in the afternoon – when the water finally warmed up and we went to dinner. The pool and small patio were essentially useless. These are things that could have been discovered had a site visit been performed.

Other things I have discovered only by being on-site at a property include things like: how long it actually takes to walk from the guest rooms to the convention center or meeting space, that the “open” floor plan has a 2-ft round column every 8 feet across the span of the exhibit hall which wasn’t indicated on the documents I received, or that the loading dock was not behind the ballroom, it was down the service corridor – the kitchen was behind the ballroom. This one made no sense because every single group would have to unload and reload at one end of the property, drag everything through the kitchen and into the back of the ballroom. What genius designed this place?

You can’t determine wear and tear of a facility until you see it, a slow draining bathtub or shower drain until you stand in dirty water, cleanliness or quality of linens and sheets until you hop in bed, helpfulness of the staff until you need them, functionality of in-house screens or projectors until you check, pop-up construction projects until they start, how loud the train is next door until it wakes you up at 4am, or how awkward it is to navigate a particular parking lot until you’re driving around in circles on your own.

Do you have a site visit (or lack thereof) story? Share it with us here or send me an email!

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