Hospitality Business Management Challenge - Trade Shows, Conferences and Other Events

Hospitality business management means a career as a hotel or resort manager. However, in addition to individual guests you will also need to wrangle big events. This is regardless of the scale and number of stars your venue has. This will be everything from conferences and seminars to full trade shows and conventions. Your venue's pricing really only effects the types of customers you will attract.

Generally speaking, as these events happen year round, they can be a lucrative source of off tourism season revenue, as well as a good way of filling up space in your hotel in the middle of the week. These clients differ from regular guests not only because events may take place in the middle of the day, while a hotel is generally otherwise used for sleeping, unless it is a residential venue, but also in the expectations of the client.

These will be a frequent enough occurrence, that you may even consider taking some event planning courses. Large venues will even have in house event planners to help clients consult before they rent, and decide on what details fit their budget, but if you are the main manager, smaller scale venues may leave it up to you. And, unlike renting rooms people will haggle. The large event halls and ballrooms of your hotel may have a fixed price, but clients will want different combinations of utilities and pricing. You will probably construct fixed price packages that make the best use of your venue's resources, but personalization always pleases guests and upselling is always a great source of revenue.

The smallest scale business events will be seminars, which may be one person, a room with chairs and some audio-visual equipment, but there are also corporate retreats, for planning sessions in a new set of scenery and morale boosting, and other multi-day events which will have some attendees staying as overnight guests. The biggest are conferences and trade shows, which will generally needs a combination of large and small rooms. You might even have a massive event hall lined with booths.

At all of these, guest will need something to eat at regular periods. There's a plethora of options, from simple pastries, through to gourmet lunch packs up to full service catered banquets. All this is within the skill set you'll cover in hotel management skill, but you may also be co-ordinating this with outside contractors. One quick hospitality business management tip: It's a lot safer for your guest to over order on food and donate the surplus after the event, than under order, as they are liable to blame you, as will the dissatisfied attendees.