Weeding Them Out

Their presence on fam trips is unmistakable. Instead of attending site inspections, they camp out all day by the pool with a “colleague.” They only show their faces for meal functions, where they huddle by the buffet or chase down hors d’oeuvres like hyenas out for fresh blood. During conversation, one wonders if they even plan meetings.
    Conventional wisdom would suggest that fam scammers undesirables who finagle their way into free trips with no intention of producing business for their hosts have all but disappeared. Hotels and convention bureaus have improved at qualifying applicants, and they say fam trips themselves have become far less frequent (see “A Dying Breed?” page 52).
    But these tales tell otherwise. Somewhere, freeloaders still lurk. Whether they’re professional scammers or meeting planners with a rusty set of ethics, they sneak onto trips and secure top suites at hotels, abusing their hosts’ trust and giving the meetings industry a bad name.
    Case in point: Meredith Plansky, sales manager for the Grand Hyatt New York, was thrilled to get a phone call in mid-March from an independent meeting planner who wanted to bring 1,000 retail employees to the Hyatt for a 10-day convention over the Fourth of July, typically one of the hotel’s slowest weekends. Bringing more than $3 million in room revenue alone, it would have been the biggest meeting the hotel had ever held, an F&B-loaded extravaganza that promised a life-changing bonus for Plansky.
    The planner was coming into town over Easter weekend, just a few days away, and wanted to arrange a site inspection and a brief stay. “It was hard to believe, but what do you do? You run with it,” says Plansky. She comped him two nights in the Presidential Suite typically priced at $5,000 per night and called the hotel’s director of sales and marketing, director of catering and Hyatt’s vice president for the northeast region to be on hand for what became an eight-hour site inspection that Saturday. She also involved Cipriani 42nd Street, the banquet hall across the street, and a sales manager from the Roosevelt Hotel, where overflow attendees would stay.
    “Everybody over here was so excited about it,” she recalls. But they also feared the story was too perfect. “David [Adelson, then the director of sales and marketing] said, ‘On a scale from one to 10, is this guy for real?’ I said five.”
    After the site inspections, the planner told his hosts he wanted to hold all his banquets at the Hyatt, which would require management to relocate multiple tentative pieces of business. To do so, David Adelson, who wanted some assurance that the business was legitimate, asked the planner to hand over a deposit for half a million dollars.
    “He didn’t even flinch,” says Adelson. “He was nutty all the way around.”
    The planner said he had arranged a meeting for 5 p.m. Monday with the retail company’s CEO. The money would be wired over at that time.
    Things were seeming awfully fishy, though. For example, when Plansky asked the planner for a business card, he took an entire day to get one, and “it looked like he just made it at Kinko’s,”  says Plansky. The website listed on the card had just the single home page. Also, most planners performing a similar site visit would attend the inspection, discuss the contract and then enjoy the city. This planner dragged out the inspection, then bugged Plansky at home all weekend, asking her how to order car service, buy tickets to The Lion King on Broadway or have chocolate-covered strawberries delivered to the room.
    Then the director of housekeeping approached Plansky. While cleaning the Presidential Suite, the staff noticed something odd. “They had enough suitcases there to move into a house with,” Plansky says. “He had four women in there.” The planner had said he was coming with his wife and 13-year-old niece.
    Housekeeping also came across a contract with the Sheraton New York over the same dates. Plansky called the Sheraton, and indeed, the mysterious planner had been there Friday.
    At the Sheraton, he had performed a similar scam but wasn’t given an elaborate suite, since none was available. The sales staff there was suspicious, too, because the phone numbers and company names he gave didn’t seem valid. “It’s hard to say to somebody, ‘By the way, your information seems wrong,’” says a spokesperson for the Sheraton New York. “It’s the hospitality industry. We try to take people at face value.”
Before he left the Sheraton, the planner behaved rudely to the staff and demanded a refund of whatever money he had spent.

    It’s an unwritten rule that a hotel shouldn’t call a third-party meeting planner’s client, but Plansky was left with no choice. When she called, the retail company had never heard of the planner and also said they never held meetings for more than 100 people.
   “I’ve been here for 10 years, and I’ve never been played like this,” Plansky says. “I don’t even like talking about it; I was so angry.”
    Then Plansky got another call from the so-called planner. The CEO would not be coming in after all, and he was checking out early. “I think he knew we were on to him,” she says.
    In a final display of chutzpah, the planner called Plansky from the front desk at checkout to complain his parking had not been comped. David Adelson, Plansky and the director of security met him at the front desk. “You are not for real,” Adelson told him. “You wasted many people’s time. Please pay for your parking and leave our hotel.”
    The planner turned pale and left the hotel, trailed by the four women. They got into a car with all the luggage and drove off. 
    Unfortunately, there’s not much to be done about this type of scam. Incidents of this nature are rare, says Mitch Ostrow, vice president of group sales with Kerzner International, the owner of the Atlantis and One&Only resort brands, based in Plantation, Fla. In most cases, there’s time to qualify the planner before the inspection. If there isn’t, or if the planner doesn’t have imminent business for the resort, Ostrow charges for the site visit and reimburses the planner if a meeting is booked.
    “In any industry, there’s always one or two percent of people who are questionable,” says Ostrow. “This is more of an anomaly than a reality.”
    Plansky, however, isn’t sure she would act differently if such a scam happened again. “I have to go along with it. I would be a bad sales manager if I didn’t,” she says. “What if it was real?”

Greed takes a holiday
Last year, Michelle W. Jones, CMP, director, member and foundation services for the National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies in Fairfax, Va., was touring a Southern city with a handful of other meeting planners. It was only her second trip in 13 years of meeting planning. The trip was beautifully executed, but one planner and her husband immediately began to grate on her. Everyone on the fam hailed from the Mid-Atlantic, but these two worked at a no-name college in California, which aroused her suspicion. Why would a college in California hold a meeting on the other side of the country?
    The first day, the group piled into a van to head downtown. The two rogues kept bragging about other trips they’d been on, including 10 days in Hawaii. “I couldn’t figure out how her husband was always able to travel with her,” says Jones. “Plus, what kind of meeting planner has that kind of time?”
    Despite being served wine at dinner, the couple ordered plenty of beer and cocktails throughout the meal. Later on, the couple relaxed in the bar and even charged drinks for other people to their room. “I was just appalled!” recalls Jones.
    The woman bugged the hosts about what gift the group would receive; when the fancy tote bag came, she asked for a second one.
    Fortunately, these greedy people didn’t ruin the trip for Jones, but their behavior thoroughly shocked and angered her. She wanted to exclaim to her hosts: “We are not all like this! Not all planners abuse your generosity!”
    Bill Boyd, CMP, CMM, CITE, president and CEO of Irving, Texas-based Sunbelt Motivation and Travel Inc., recalls his first experience with a scammer 15 years ago, when he was organizing a fam trip. One planner couldn’t go and actually passed the invitation along to his neighbor.
    “The neighbor went on the trip!” Boyd exclaims. “It became clear when he wasn’t able to enjoy a cocktail party and talk shop. This person wants to talk gardening, and I’m like, ‘Hello?’”
    Aside from the con artists who don’t plan meetings in the first place, it’s the inexperienced planners and administrative assistants who give their profession a black eye by accepting trips without really having any business to offer, says Jennifer Brown, CMP, a partner at Meeting Sites Resource in Irvine, Calif. These offenders generally see the light once they realize it’s not ethical to take trips as vacations, Brown says, adding, “It’s a learning process. But if they don’t have a lot of business, why did the hotels invite them?”  

A DYING BREED?

Wendy Surkan

Tourism Vancouver hasn’t organized a fam trip since 1999. According to Wendy Surkan, bureau manager, meeting and convention sales, Eastern USA, “If I’m at a trade show and someone says, ‘When are you doing your next fam?’ the radar goes off and says, ‘Is this person really serious about our city?’”
    Indeed, the fam trip might one day be a relic. CVBs and hotel chains complain that the price of a fam doesn’t always justify the investment, decision-makers rarely have time to attend and airlines are less and less willing to provide free tickets.
    Chains such as Marriott and Starwood have cut back on fams and focused on partner events networking trips without all the touring to build relationships with current clients. Even the term “fam” has fallen out of fashion, replaced by “focus group,” “hosted-buyer program” or simply “site inspection,” to emphasize the business aims of the trip beyond simple familiarization.
    The Metropolitan Tucson (Ariz.) Convention and Visitors Bureau now promotes a “You Fly, We Buy” offer, in which a meeting planner submitting a qualified RFP will be flown in, housed and given a customized site inspection, all on the MTCVB’s dime. Given the qualified RFP requirement, only planners with a legitimate interest or really good liars can take the trip. -- J.V.

The qualifying queen
For 30 years, Niki Clarke has been the antidote to fam scammers and perhaps the industry’s most famous fam-trip qualifier. Director of research for Sarasota, Fla.-based International Conference and Incentive Travel Research Inc., Clarke works with international tourist boards to keep bogus fam trippers from joining hosted buyer programs.
    Intuition is Clarke’s primary weapon. She interviews applicants about their history as planners; those whose stories sound too perfect arouse her suspicion. If she finds someone has lied to her, she takes that person off the trip and adds the name to her blacklist of more than 3,500 people. She guards this list with her life, because it is her livelihood, and because if it ever were to fall into the wrong hands she could be sued well past bankruptcy by those who felt they’d been wrongly accused.
    British by birth, Clarke began qualifying meeting and incentive travel planners for fam trips at the British Tourist Authority (now called VisitBritain) in New York City in the 1970s. After just weeks on the job, she fell into her first trap. The day of one trip’s departure, a London hotelier took a gander at the attendee list and spotted the name of the biggest scammer he’d ever encountered, a professor whom Clarke had interviewed in person. The hotelier called Clarke and sent her rushing to the airport and onto the plane. The professor, reeking of pipe smoke and garlic, was sitting in first class, sipping a glass of champagne.
    She said, “Professor, you’re not going to London, because you’ve lied to me.” He replied with the decorum of a Bond villain, “I will finish my champagne first.”
    From then, Clarke made it her mission to foil fam scammers’ unethical schemes. “It costs the taxpayers [who support] the convention bureaus and national tourist offices, as well as the DMCs, hotels and airlines, a fortune, and these people don’t care a whit,” she says. “They lie through their teeth, and it’s a game to them.”
    Since then, she has blocked access on trips to countless people. Once, Clarke found out that a woman who went to five countries on fams was only an assistant in an office and had no authority over meetings. Clarke informed the woman’s unsuspecting boss; after 20-odd years with the company, the assistant was fired on the spot.
    Another fam-trip qualifier, who prefers to remain nameless, says scammers often volunteer too much information, tipping her off that they’re spinning a tale. And when they’re called on the carpet, “They usually get very angry, threatening never to go to the destination,” she says.
    “These people apply to anything because they think it’s their divine right to go,” says Clarke. “This is not a free-for-all. This is a serious buying program.”