It’s a brave new world in COVID-19 times not just for event producers, but vendors as well. How they are navigating the bumpy ride was the focus of the “Coronavirus Event Safety Strategies” panel moderated by Terri Breining, CMP, CMM, CED (MPI San Diego Chapter), president of the Breining Group Inc.
The primary takeaway is that we all are playing a role in keeping employees and attendees safe while finding a pathway back to business.
“We have 100 different initiatives for disinfectants to make sure our employees and customers feel safe,” said Norma Dean, director of national specialty sales for Delta Air Lines, which has taken a strong stance on safety protocols such as wearing masks. “We ask ourselves, ‘How do we continuously check the safety of our employees to make sure the customers are safe, and how do we innovate with the customers in mind?’”
She said employees are tested every day and that she would be tested after attending WEC.
Michael Crum, director of the public events department for the City of Fort Worth, spoke of a true cultural shift for venues in his jurisdiction.
“It’s really going from clean, which is an appearance or smell, to sanitizing and disinfecting, which gets rid of things we don’t want to pick up,” he said.
And for hotels, the business models and customer choices are changing.
“The leisure business has sustained the hotel category the past four to six months,” said Kaaren Hamilton, CMP, CMM, HMCC, vice president of global sales for RLH Corporation and a member of the MPI International Board of Directors. “We have exterior corridor-style hotels where you pull up in your car and go right in. Those were previously hard to sell and now that’s very popular.”
But things get tricky with compliance: both on the employee side, but also the attendees. Where do you draw the line between who in the event production chain is responsible for what?
That led to some of the stickiest conversations, including Breining asking the audience, “Who is on the naughty list of venues that secretly are anything goes?”
Dean said there are no grey lines at Delta.
“If they say, ‘I can’t wear a mask,’ then we have a doctor onsite they can see,” she said. “And we can rearrange the plane. We are so serious about this—we have 400 elite members who are no longer allowed to step foot on our aircraft.”
Crum said the issue of mask wearing is complicated because rules vary by jurisdiction and the spaces he manages are for the public.
“It’s easier to say you can’t be on our planes as opposed to you can’t come to our rodeo,” he said, noting that differences in risk tolerance are playing out across age groups. “Youth travel never stopped. That along with leisure really sustained our hotels and kept them open.”
Looking to the future, Dean some recent adjustments are here to stay.
“Wearing a mask will become something we become acclimated to, just like Asia has been for years,” she said.
Hamilton sees an upside for hotels.
“There will be some permanent changes in how we do things, and some innovation,” she said. “We’ve been trying for years to move to contactless check-in and keyless entry, and we’ve been able to speed that up exponentially. We’ve also moved to texting as a way to communicate with room service, or anything you might need at our hotels.”
The session was sponsored by Caesars Entertainment.
