Overcoming Event Disasters

How to Respond to Worst-Case Scenarios and Save Your Event

You’ve heard the horror stories and hope that they never happen to you: hotels cancelling full blocks at the last minute, Icelandic volcanos wreaking havoc on global air travel, construction delays leaving venues unfinished and unusable, keynote speakers going MIA. While you can’t always predict what curveballs life will throw your way, with a bit of quick thinking, you can minimize the impact that they will have on the overall success of your event.

It might be hard to believe that you could overcome huge, unexpected obstacles like a hotel cancellation or transportation snafu without attendees noticing or the quality of the event suffering, but the cases below are great examples of how creativity and resourcefulness can save the day.

Your transportation plans go awry

Whether it’s a sudden snowstorm that grounds all flights or a transit strike, anything that prevents attendees from getting to where they need to be can be a huge headache for event planners. However, depending on the situation, there are things that you can do to keep it from derailing your event.

One time at Meetingmax’s annual Unconvention, a bus didn’t show up to transport attendees to the next venue. While this certainly threw the organizers for a loop, they were able to think on their feet and came up with a “walking session” where attendees were paired up with one another and given specific talking points to discuss while they walked to the next venue. Attendees ended up thinking that this was part of the agenda and enjoyed the opportunity to stretch their legs and get some fresh air.

Your room block suffers a hit

From renovations that go on longer than expected to a burst pipe that makes an entire floor of rooms uninhabitable, you can suddenly find yourself missing a huge chunk of your room block and forced to find new accommodation for attendees.

In the case of one major, city-wide event, the event planner found out that 600 rooms in one of her hotels were not going to be ready due to construction delays. Finding new accommodation for 600 people is a daunting task, but ultimately, she was able to successfully rehouse them by scattering them across a number of nearby hotels.

While construction delays are sometimes unavoidable, one thing that event planners can do to protect themselves is to include clauses in the hotel contract stipulating that it is the hotel’s responsibility to rehouse guests and communicate this change to them as well as to provide compensation to the event planner should construction or renovation delays make the original housing block unavailable.

There’s an issue with the food

While event planners often take great care to ensure that attendees are well fed and that any dietary restrictions are taken into account, there are occasionally times when the food doesn’t meet the guests’ needs.

This happened one time at Unconvention. The organizers took attendees to an avant-garde Japanese restaurant. Midway through the meal, it became clear that attendees were wary of the exotic food (some attendees had never eaten raw fish before), and the small portion sizes weren’t helping to satisfy their hunger either. In response to this, the organizers decided to run to a nearby restaurant and order poutines for everyone. The organizers made light of the situation, thanked attendees for trying the meal and reassured them that a crowd-pleasing Canadian snack was on its way for those who were still hungry.

By responding to obstacles as soon as they arise, employing creativity in how you solve them and being ready to make changes on the fly, you can overcome event disasters, reduce their impact and ensure that your attendees still have a great experience.

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Take a look at how a disaster zone could actually be beneficial to your events - Why You Should Consider Holding Your Next Event in Disaster Zone

Jeff Duncan is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Meetingmax, who provides the event industry with sophisticated and flexible Room Block Management software serviced with Ridiculously Remarkable Support. Meetingmax is used by travel organizations in dozens of North American destinations and by organizers of high-profile events including South by Southwest, TED Conferences, Cisco Live, and Oracle OpenWorld. The software provides users with a simple, yet powerful means to manage conference and event room bookings. Meetingmax's user conference, The Unconvention, takes an unconventional approach to your typical conference.