In May, I attended Collaborate Marketplace, a networking event for corporate meeting professionals hosted by my company, Collinson Media & Events, in collaboration with the launch of Collaborate magazine. We had a number of excellent speakers at the event, including Karen McCullough, a generations and branding expert who grabbed the audience's attention with her energy, enthusiasm and talk about what's wrong with Gen Y. It went over well in a crowd of mostly Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, but the few Gen Yers in the crowd, including myself, we're so excited about about hearing everything that's wrong with us (we live with our parents, can't hold down steady jobs, love to text).

What do I write about at work? Well, convention centers, of course! Here's a story I wrote that appeared in both Connect and Rejuvenate magazines about trends at these massive meeting venues.

If you build it, they will come. That’s the conventional wisdom around convention centers. Cities, in an effort to boost a visitors’ market or in some cases build one from scratch, commit to building a building, a very large and expensive one. Few businesses operate the way a convention center does. Operational 365 days a year, it needs to get enough people to fill it for a number of those days to be profitable. Not to mention there are dozens of other convention centers across the country in similar markets competing for business.

The good ones thrive—the ones that are innovative, the ones where management teams listen to the needs of clients. “We have to be more creative in how we package things,” says Eric Blanc, president of the Association for Convention Operations Management and director of sales and marketing at the Tampa Convention Center. It’s a competitive market for both destinations and convention centers, says Blanc. “Meeting planners have all of the leverage and the smart ones know it and they use it to their advantage,” he says.

Read the entire feature story here.

It's strange sometimes to think that my husband and I both ended up in the travel and tourism industry, him with Hyatt hotels and me with Collinson Media and Events, a destination marketing and media company. As an editor for our three industry publications, I write stories for meeting planners and group travel organizers. It's not really what I ever expected I'd be doing, but it's interesting none the less.

A few months ago, I wrote about Hyatt hotels and four other large hotel companies and talked about what they're doing to appeal to meeting planners to get them to bring groups and events to their properties. One thing I never realized before my husband started working for Hyatt is that hotels make the majority of their money from meetings and events, not from vacationers and leisure travlers. That's why meetings are so important to them. Below are the first few paragraphs of the story, and you can read the entire story on the Connect magazine website.

We’re lucky to live in a world with so many options. At the coffee shop, we can choose between a latte, macchiato or cappuccino, blended with heavy cream or low-fat soymilk. We go to the electronics store where LCD and plasma televisions stare back at us from the wall in a number of different sizes and at different price points. We can choose from millions of apps to customize our handheld smartphones. When we travel, we choose ocean-view or atrium-view rooms, queen or king beds, and soft or hard pillows.

The options for types of hotels seem endless, too. Boutique or big-city hotel? Resort property or small retreat? For meeting planners, size, meeting space and amenities weed out some of the options, but navigating the pool of full-service hotel properties can still seem like a daunting task. Despite the wealth of options among hotels, a few multi-brand companies continue to book the majority of the country’s meetings and conferences year in and year out. Five companies — InterContinental, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Starwood — keep giving planners reasons to book their next big meetings with them.

Read the rest of the story here.