The Peabody Orlando.

Convention Wisdom

America's Leading associations are expanding memberships and providing more and better member services by locating their annual conventions, board meetings, retreats, workshops, and training seminars in spacious, ultra-luxurious hotels and resorts.

What's new in the meetings and conventions business today is not just Location, Location, Location, but devotion, devotion, devotion to high-tech, cyberspace gizmos and gadgets.

The Peabody Orlando is a good example of the marriage of prime location to high-tech hospitality capabilities. This beautiful, marble-halled, orchid-decorated, art-filled, 891-room convention and resort hotel with 57,000 square feet of flexible meeting space is on the cutting edge of hospitality and high-tech conventions.

The hotel has all the bells and whistles of 21st century meetings technology, including two separate two-line telephones per guest room with built-in data ports with dial-up access to the Internet, a full Xerox Business Center, and some of the most progressive hotel service quality monitoring and accounting systems, all discreetly hidden behind the hotel's champagne-colored marble walls, cascading waterfalls, towering palms, and priceless art.

"Our business guests today are high-tech, cyberspace, and e-commerce savvy," says Barry Anderson, vice president of marketing, who thought of the two separate telephone lines per guest room back in 1984 when the hotel was still a hole in the ground and no more than an architectural rendering, long before the explosion of laptops and the Internet. "We own the equipment and the Lines needed to provide worldwide high-speed connectivity, and will continue to Lead the meetings and hospitality industry in technology, especially in the telecommunication area, and with the systems that allow us to monitor, minute by minute, our guests needs and expectations."

Today's hotel conferences and conventions require seamless connectivity. The Peabody Orlando offers upto-the-minute telecommunication services such as a state-of-the-art fiber-optic and Cat-V "infranetwork" that connects all meeting rooms to a central, secure point; the infranetwork can be used for private networking and/or high speed (T-1 based) Internet service. A direct fiber-optic link to the Orange County Convention Center gives clients the opportunity to send data and video from the center to the hotel's infranetwork; video can be broadcast to meeting rooms and/or guest rooms. The hotel also has a high capacity of telephone lines with nearly 200 direct inward dial lines and a higher ratio of outbound lines per guest room than any major hotel in Orlando.

On a softer, gentler note, The Peabody Orlando's high-tech convention wisdom is balanced by a unique, decades-old, twice-daily ritual that endears the place not only to convention-goers, but also to their families. The March of The Peabody Orlando Ducks, a 60-plus-year tradition taken from the hotel's sister property, The Peabody Memphis, provides the "warm fuzzies" to young and old alike.

"The duck march is a wonderful ice-breaker or reason to take a break from meetings and workshop sessions," observes Anne Murphy, a recent meeting participant at the hotel. "It's quite funny in the early days of a meeting to see all of the business people with their Vuitton briefcases, dressed in Armani and Dior suits, skeptically, silently, waiting for the duck march to begin. Once those little ducks start boogeying down that red carpet, the 'suits' are into it just like everybody else, oohing, aahing, and clapping. Who can resist the sight of five Little duckies marching to John Philip Souza?"

High-tech telecommunication and marching ducks are just part of The Peabody Orlando meeting experience. Recently, Orlando Magazine bestowed its prestigious Golden Palm Award on The Peabody Orlando for "Best Hotel Food," citing all three of the hotel's restaurants, Dux, Capriccio, and the B-Line Diner. Meeting planners nationwide agree, adding quality catering and banqueting; efficient, smooth check-in and check-out; superb meeting and function space; and guest services to the citation list.