Rustic yet regal:
Romantik Hotel
Neumuehle in
Wartmannsroth, Germany
For medical meeting
planners, the most tangible results of the
pharmaceutical-marketing regulations enacted earlier this decade
involve the rule that drug companies cannot pay for doctors to stay
at luxury hotels -- even if they offer competitive pricing -- since
this might create the appearance of a bribe. In many cases, the
change is easy to make: Whereas before, a group of doctors might be
housed at a Ritz-Carlton or a Four Seasons, now they’re put in a
more moderate Hyatt or Westin.
But for world-renowned doctors
accustomed to the height of luxury, anything less might not
suffice. Judy Benaroche Johnson, CMP, president and CEO of Rx
Worldwide Meetings Inc., based in Plano, Texas, knows this from
experience. She recently planned a meeting for a large group of
Korean doctors at an upper-upscale hotel -- the market tier just
below luxury -- in Florida. The front desk staff was rude,
showerheads fell onto guests in their rooms, the air conditioning
wasn’t working in meeting rooms and a fire alarm was ringing all
day.
“They were so offended that they
weren’t taken care of, that we didn’t respect their visit while
they were there,” she says. “The week before, we were at the
Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, and it was beyond flawless. They just get
it.”
Dr. Robert Green, managing director,
medical communications, for the Continuing Education Alliance in
Greenwich, Conn., sees physician attendance falling and education
suffering because the hotels aren’t up to snuff.
“When you take a meeting in the city
hotel box, you’ll have much less capacity to inspire the mind than
if you were taking the doctors to a property that’s more
stimulating,” says Green. “In the end, what suffers is the patient
population, because people don’t come to meetings.”
For meetings that require luxury -- but
won’t set off red flags by the hotel name alone -- site selection
takes a bit of sleuthing. Here are some pointers from Johnson and
other meeting planners and hoteliers.
Quiet class: Watermark Hotel
& Spa, San Antonio
Pick an independent
hotel
The best way to find a hotel without an
obvious luxury brand is to look for one without a brand at all.
Hotels such as the 99-room Watermark Hotel &
Spa in San Antonio and the 60-room XVBeacon in Boston offer a luxury experience without
a big name. The Watermark is right on San Antonio’s Riverwalk;
rooms feature wrought-iron four-poster beds, leather-topped desks
and elaborate marble bathrooms. XV Beacon has high-tech rooms
(including the bathrooms) and offers a chauffeured Lexus to all
guests.
Besides word of mouth, there are three
good ways of finding one of these hotels. One option is to use a
third-party site-selection firm, with representatives whose job it
is to know which hotels will be best for which meetings. A second
way is to ask a hotel representation firm (a company hired by
hotels to help increase sales), such as the Krisam Group or
Associated Luxury Hotels, to proffer their most upscale selections.
For example, James Schultenover, president of The Krisam Group,
suggests the following hotels and resorts:
* The 775-room Grand America
Hotel in Salt Lake City, which is one of two five-diamond
hotels in Utah;
* The 679-room Hotel del
Coronado in Coronado, Calif., a historic hotel on the
beach that was the setting for the Marilyn Monroe film, Some
Like It Hot;
* The newly renovated Rancho
Bernardo Inn in San Diego, where each of the 287 rooms has
a private patio and a 20,000-square-foot conference center opened
this year;
* The 255-room Sanctuary at
Kiawah Island, S.C., a golf paradise with five
championship courses;
* The 171-room Lodge at Torrey
Pines in La Jolla, Calif., with meeting space that looks
out on the golf course;
* The 98-room Sanctuary on
Camelback Mountain in Paradise Valley, Ariz., a
rejuvenating haven built into the side of a mountain.
All are luxury hotels; none shout it
from the rooftops. On the other hand, Schultenover discourages
member properties from trying to downplay their status or their
resort components by cutting off the “resort and spa” from their
name in the contract, for example.
A third option for finding luxe
independents: Search the catalogs of hotel marketing portfolios,
such as The Leading Hotels of the World, Relais & Chateaux or
Preferred Hotel Group.
With any of these methods, be sure to
solicit a verbal recommendation from someone you trust, as
upper-upscale ho-tels often will be lumped in with the luxury
properties.
For small meetings, Design Hotels
represents more than 140 gorgeous, memorable, high-style properties
all over the world, most of them offering authentic luxury. The
60-room Chambers Hotel in Minneapolis and the
125-room Setai in Miami, for example, are
relatively new, and both are often cited as the best hotels in
their respective cities. The Chambers (sister hotel to the Chambers
in New York City) is bedecked with more than 200 pieces of art from
the owner’s private collection, while the Setai inspires
tranquility with its contemporary Asian design.