Good news travels fast! Since that first meeting when conferences were discussed, we’ve had multiple requests for meetings from various other teams and leaders throughout the organization. Everyone wants to start talking about conferences and so do we! Having these calls truly makes it feel real. I am thrilled to know that I’m not the only one thinking about events, reminiscing about past gatherings and starting to plan agendas and objectives for future ones!
To date, we have had one initial kick-off call with leadership to discuss our goals for the Americas Commercial Conference, including Hilton’s recovery efforts, fostering internal relationships, restoration of travel and live events, and the future of the company.
To prepare for this meeting, our team pulled together a presentation deck – outlining the following talking points – to guide our discussion:
- Event overview (dates, location, hotel property, attendees)
- Event goals and objectives
- Attendee counts by team (this took some wrangling and help from HR, as we’ve had so many changes over the last year)
- Budget review from previous conference
- Agenda (preliminary version)
- Next steps and immediate action items
In the deck, we also included imagery from the last Americas Commercial Conference to help illustrate our objectives and the emotional impact events have for our attendees. Over the hour meeting, we aligned on who would be invited to attend, and most importantly, what needed to be done next to get final approval.
Americas Commercial Conference (ACC) will bring together above property commercial teams for the first time in 3+ years to meet, engage, align and continue to drive recovery initiatives. In order to showcase Hilton’s presence in Vegas and its most recent hotel developments, we concluded that ACC would be a great opportunity to do just that.
Furthermore, we are working with our Vegas hotels on room blocks, hotel rates and space, so that our planning team can develop a detailed budget for leadership approval.
In the meantime, we are pulling the project plan from the last conference we managed in February 2020, to inform our roadmap for this year. We are taking this opportunity to review our past plans to see how we can best improve planning for this event. While we do this, we are also reviewing a plan for resources. More to come on that front, but we hope to hear some good news on approvals soon!
Have questions about this week’s diary entry? Email SpecialEvents@Hilton.com to learn more.
