Characteristics of a Corporate Meeting Planner


A corporate meeting planner is one busy person. If you’ve read a few of the blogs here then there’s one thing that I’m sure you’ve seen often and that is that a corporate meeting planner wears many different hats. A lot of people have asked me over the years what characteristics are important for a corporate meeting planner.

A Corporate Meeting Planner Needs to Be Extremely Organized

In order to successfully execute a meeting, a corporate meeting planner needs to be a very organized person. But in answer to the question that I’ve been asked many times in the past regarding what characteristics stand out, what I usually tell people is that a corporate meeting planner has to be good at logistics. After all, most corporate meetings involve a whole slew of activities.

Some of the logistics that are involved with executing a corporate meeting are:

Transportation– quite often, and especially with corporate meetings, the corporate meeting planner is required to arrange transportation for the delegates at the airport (and sometimes from their starting cities as well) and transfer them to the hotel where the meeting will be taking place. Many times they are also charged with having to make airline reservations for the delegates as well. If a corporate meeting planner’s lucky enough the transportation logistics will revolve around one or two days before the meeting and one or two days after the meeting. But many times their department is handling individual flight request as well as individual ground transportation. From here they will develop a travel manifest. But ask any seasoned corporate meeting planner if that’s the end of it and you’re likely to get a loud chuckle from the planner. Because there are often many changes to flights (and hence ground transportation as well) due to last-minute changes, weather etc. I’ve worked with transportation manifests where you could barely read because of all the writing (changes) by the time the meeting was finished.

Hotel and Meeting Logistics – on top of getting all of the delegates to the meeting’s location, the corporate meeting planner also has to make sure that the hotel is booked, meeting rooms are blocked, food and beverage arrangements have been made and all of the appropriate speakers and/or presenters have been booked. You’re starting to get the idea why meeting planner checklist are so important to their jobs.

If you think a corporate meeting planner has a tough job then you are correct. But if you ask a corporate meeting planner if they like their job, all lot will tell you that they love the fact that they have so many components that are so different when organizing a meeting. A corporate meeting planner needs to be good at logistics. As a matter of fact organizational skills are probably at the top of the list of characteristics required for corporate meeting planner.

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