An interesting trend is coming about in the hotel AV market - a segment currently dominated by the audiovisual rental business. More and more hotels are either investing in upgrading their conference centers with amenities like in-room coffee break bars, bathrooms, and even installing AV permanently in the room, or they are renovating their standard meeting rooms and including integrated DSL access, high-performance audio systems that include wireless microphones, and projectors mounted in the ceiling.

Is this a trend?

It appears that way, for now at least.

Recognizing that the competition for meeting space is heating up in this booming economy, as well as the appearance of unlikely competition from places like Kinko's and airport lounges, the hotel industry is rethinking how they manage meetings for clients. In some cases, they've even redesigned the entire facility to set a bar that well exceeds what everyone else in the hotel industry is even able to attain.

For instance, take Marriott's Evergreen Conference Center in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Evergreen features an average good-quality Marriott-run hotel property, but one of the best Conference Centers in the US. Not only does each room feature either an in-room break bar that includes coffee, sodas, water, a self-serve candy bar, an ice cream cart and daily bakery selections, but it also features built-in T1 line access, DSL access, video and audio signal routing to every other conference room in the facility and also a bathroom within a 30-second walk to every meeting room. This bar is very hard to attain at many of Marriott's other facilities, or most other hotel chains for that matter.

How do they do it?

Well, the Evergreen Conference Center offers a Conference Package that includes the room night charge, all meals (at the BEST all-you-can-eat food buffet this writer's ever seen at a hotel - and, yes, I've been to Vegas many times), the meeting room and all the meeting room amenities including that awesome break bar. This flat-rate charge means all the costs, as a meeting planner, are capable of being calculated ahead of time. No guessing and no last minute surprises.

So, what's the chance that in-room AV gear may be included one day as part of the package?

"It's extremely attractive to large corporations," commented Monroe Jost, president of Dallas-based J&S Audio Visual, a leading rental services provider to resort hotel properties all over North America. "One of the nicest, if not the nicest, places I've seen is the Moon Palace just outside Cancun, Mexico. Their flat-fee pricing (around $300 US) includes the room, all the food you can eat [at five restaurants], and alcoholic beverages and it even includes use of jet skis!"

Mr. Jost believes that this trend will continue in the Conference Center world, but may or may not bleed over into the standard corporate hotel world.

"We aren't seeing a trend towards all-inclusive packages that include AV yet; however, I must say the Four Seasons in downtown Dallas just adopted that policy, so who knows," said Mr. Jost. "But a lot of hotels already have a basic AV package that includes a flip chart, a slide projector and a screen for only $5 to $8 per day."

So, what's the chance they may add in the projector?

One of the biggest obstacles to that is that the average hotel probably has ten flip charts to every one LCD projector. So, until the average hotel has either a projector in every room or a projector to accommodate every room, it's unlikely to happen.

"I agree totally," says Ed Goodman, senior vice president of AVW Audio Visual, one of the nation's largest in-house hotel providers of AV services. "The way modern meetings are structured today, there is almost an LCD projector in every room and that takes a lot of inventory and a constant change and upgrade of equipment. Most hotels aren't going to take on that burden of cost."

In fact, by having an outside AV company, like AVW and J&S, act as the in-house AV department, the hotel isn't burdened with that inventory responsibility at all. It's pure profit for them as they are, in a sense, using the AV company's inventory for free and charging the client for the usage. It's a win-win situation as the AV company can use the equipment whenever and wherever they need to (even off property if required) while keeping it upgraded and operational, and the hotel chain makes money off the rental charge and the room usage charges as well.

"The conference packages idea came from Europe in the 1980's." Mr. Goodman continues, "A lot of European companies came over to the USA and bought up a few hotel chains and resorts and introduced that concept. That's the environment where we encounter that kind of set-up. They include the room, the AV, the meals and golf."

One of the big problems with packaging is who burdens the loss. If a corporation comes in and uses an average amount of AV, then both the hotel and the AV company win, but if they use major AV in each and every room, someone's going to lose and it usually ends up being the AV provider. So, separating the two continues to be the trend.

Will we ever see the day where you walk in a hotel and there are projectors in every meeting room ceiling and videoconferencing galore? Well, never say never, but as the pace of technological changes continues to be rapid, by the time they get the stuff installed, there's a good chance it's already been replaced by something better and brighter.

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Gary Kayye, CTS is Principal of Kayye Consulting an industry consulting firm specializing in providing marketing, business development and training consulting for ProAV dealers and manufacturers. He, and his partner Jody Thomas,have developed a business plan that is effectively a "Blueprint" Guide to building a Systems Integration company from scratch or by converting a projector reseller to a Systems Integrator. The Blueprint Business Plan is over 100 pages long and even includes sample systems projects. It's expensive, but worth the investment. He may be reached at his web site at www.kayye.com or via e-mail at gkayye@kayye.com.

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