What Meeting Planners Wish Hotels Knew
April Urbine
SVP, Venue Sales
I've spent more than thirty years in hospitality sales — first at Wyndham, then leading venue sales across the private club world at ClubCorp, and most recently in the hotel space. In that time, I've sat across from thousands of meeting planners. I've heard what they love, what frustrates them, and — perhaps most telling — what makes them come back. Or not.
Here's what I've learned: the meeting planner's decision to return to your property almost never comes down to the room rates or the square footage of your ballroom. It comes down to how the experience felt. And few things shape that feeling more than what happens with AV and event production.
Hotels don't always see it that way. And that gap — between how hotels think about AV and how meeting planners experience it — is worth closing.
The Planner Remembers What the Hotel Forgets
When a meeting planner selects a venue, they're putting their reputation on the line. Their client — whether that's a CEO, a board of directors, or 500 attendees — doesn't know or care about the behind-the-scenes logistics. They know whether the mic worked during the keynote. They know whether the screen was visible from the back of the room. They know whether someone showed up to fix the problem quickly, or whether they were left scrambling.
The planner carries that experience with them. If it went well, your property is on their short list forever. If it didn't, you may never hear from them again — and you may never know why.
What meeting planners wish hotels understood is this: AV isn't a line item. It's the delivery mechanism for everything the event is trying to accomplish.
The Vendor Mindset Is Costing You Relationships
Over the years, I've watched hotels treat in-house AV as a necessary cost — something to be managed, minimized, and kept out of the way. The AV team operates in the background, the contract is buried in the venue agreement, and the relationship between the hotel and the production team is arm's-length at best.
Meeting planners feel that. They feel it in how responsive the team is during the planning process. They feel it in whether the on-site crew seems invested in making the event great or just in getting through the day. They feel it in what happens when something goes wrong — because something always does.
The properties that earn repeat business aren't the ones where nothing ever goes wrong. They're the ones where, when something goes wrong, someone owns it immediately, solves it quickly, and makes the planner feel taken care of. That only happens when the AV team operates as a true extension of the hotel — not as a separate vendor with a separate agenda.
What Planners Actually Want
I've asked meeting planners this question directly, in hundreds of conversations across my career. The answers are remarkably consistent.
They want one point of contact who knows the event inside and out. They want that person to be reachable — not just during business hours, not just by email. They want proactive communication, not reactive scrambling. They want someone who has read the event brief before the site visit, not during it.
Most of all, they want to feel like the hotel is rooting for them. Like everyone in that building wants this event to go well — not just the sales manager who closed the deal, but the crew setting up the room at 5 a.m.
That’s not something technology alone can deliver. It’s the result of culture, alignment, and true partnership.
The Properties That Get It Right
The hotel properties I've seen consistently win with meeting planners share a few things in common. Their AV and event production teams are embedded, not contracted out. They're part of the hotel's culture, trained alongside hotel staff, and measured by the same standards of guest satisfaction. When a planner walks in for a site visit, the AV team is there — not as an afterthought, but as a selling point.
These properties also invest in the relationship before the contract is signed. They understand that a meeting planner who feels genuinely supported during the planning process is far more likely to trust the property when things get complicated on-site.
The result is planners who come back year after year. Who recommend the property to colleagues. Who build their event calendars around venues they trust.
A Different Kind of Partnership
What I'm describing isn't complicated, but it does require a different way of thinking about the AV relationship. It requires hotels to see event production not as a commodity to be procured, but as a capability to be invested in.
The meeting planners I've worked with over the years aren't asking for perfection. They're asking for partnership. They want to know that when they bring their clients to your property, someone there cares as much about the outcome as they do.
That's the standard worth setting. And for the hotels that set it, the business follows.
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