SALES & MARKETING
rooms and increased the meeting and convention footprint to 85,000 square feet from 50,000 .
The hotel ’ s third floor now has smaller meeting spaces , including 13 rooms , seven of which have themes and include , for instance , a pingpong table that converts to a meeting table , and a “ Dr . Strangelove ” power board meeting space with a circular table and a series of video screens that curve 180 degrees around the room .
Anne Marie Johns , regional director of sales and marketing , eastern Canada , for Fairmont , says the goal was to increase meetings at the hotel by 25 % and leverage likely users of the space , including Montreal ’ s energetic creative industry , to spread the word .
“ The locals are your number one ambassadors for your product , and they are also going to be the demand driver for meetings from outside the city ” among their international companies , Johns says . Locals make up about 30 % of meetings at the hotel .
Even before the expansion , “ there was
Indoor to outdoor seating designed by Gettys Group for the Renaissance Chicago Downtown
“ MEETING SPACES ARE TRYING TO BETTER REFLECT HOW PEOPLE ACTUALLY GATHER IN TODAY ’ S WORLD .”
already a trend in small meetings ,” Johns says – the hotel was hosting about 700 meetings of 50 people or less annually . The themed rooms on the third floor , called CoLab3 for collaboration , took inspiration from IT company work spaces and broke out of what Johns calls the “ plain , square-box meeting rooms .”
“ The mandate behind that was … let ’ s create a creative environment , get people out of their day-to-day , come in for a oneday or two-day meeting , solve a problem , brainstorm new ideas ,” Johns says .
For Meg Prendergast , principal at Chicago-based interior design firm Gettys Group , creating an engaging meeting space often means carving out nontraditional areas in the lobby or a hotel ’ s F & B areas for pop-up opportunities .
— MEG PRENDERGAST , GETTYS GROUP
“ Lobbies are becoming much more activated because people are hanging out in them more often ,” Prendergast says .
“ People don ’ t really live their lives in really regimented rows of tables with banquet chairs anywhere else outside of that kind of venue ,” she continues . “ So in essence , new meeting spaces are trying to better reflect how people actually gather in today ’ s world .”
And the breakout space is just as critical as the meeting room itself , Prendergast adds .
During a revamp of meeting spaces at the Renaissance Chicago Downtown a year ago , Gettys persuaded the hotel to forego four dated meeting rooms in lieu of a small ballroom with plenty of natural light . Meeting attendees then had access to both a lofted gallery space and an adjoining rooftop deck .
“ So the notion that people can just flow from one space to the next is another element here ,” Prendergast says . “ And then everyone feels like they ’ re getting a completely fantastic experience in the space of one floor but using a relatively contained amount of square footage .”
If you ’ re a hotel that can ’ t afford to rebuild or refurbish outdated meeting spaces , great lighting should be your new best friend , says Prendergast , whose firm employs a lighting consultant on projects .
“ Lighting is so incredible ,” she says . “ Light , space and air quality are always going to be the top three things that are important to people . And if you don ’ t have those , attendees may not realize what they ’ re not getting , but it definitely affects their experience .”
52 hotelsmag . com December 2017