Conference Hotel Research Articles

International Commercial Dispute Resolution: The Challenge of the Twenty-first Century

WHEN I reveal the theme for this lecture you may well think that I am a bit like the proverbial turkey extolling the virtues of Christmas. Looking into my crystal ball, I predict mat over the next few years we shall experience a proportionate decline in the engagement of third parties for assistance in resolving mature international trade disputes. If I am right about this the current level of expansion of work for arbitrators and mediators will decline, and there will be an increasing demand for dispute management specialists rather than dispute resolution experts. I propose to try to explain my views as to how the dispute resolution community might react to this challenge. From my perspective, as the twenty-first century gets under way, we are already seeing a movement away from the three classical forms of third party intervention in dispute resolution – the judge in his court; the arbitrator in his hotel conference room; and the mediator shuttling between the parties, trying to get the parties to reach some form of acceptable compromise settlement. In Europe and the USA we now hear the phrase ‘dispute management’ used almost as often as the traditional term ‘dispute resolution’. ‘Dispute management’ is a relatively new term and I am not sure that we could all agree on what it means. For me it means two things. First, and most important, it means dispute avoidance ; secondly, it means that where the parties cannot avoid falling into dispute, they enter into a structured direct negotiation process designed to limit the occasions on which they will need to involve a third party to the barest possible minimum. My main purpose today, after explaining why I think this is going to happen, is to take a look at the likely consequences for all of …

Unity of Consciousness and Bi-Level Externalism

In a conference hotel recently I accompanied a philosophical friend on a shopping expedition for some bold red and green wrapping papers, to be displayed as props in his upcoming talk on sensory qualia. Most examples used in philosophical discussions of consciousness have this static, snapshot character. The vehicle for a conscious perception of red wrapping paper may be a pattern of activation in a region of the brain devoted to visual input. But while walking, a person can turn her head, notice the wrapping paper, reach out, and grasp it. Our survival often depends on our ability to negotiate a changing environment by simultaneous streams of perception and action. What do vehicles of conscious content look like when there is realistically complex interaction with the world? A dynamic view requires, according to Susan Hurley, a ‘twisted rope’, the strands of which are continuous multi-modal streams of inputs and outputs looping into the environment and back into the central nervous system. The twist in the rope is analogous to the unity of consciousness. The contents of conscious perceptions depend directly— non-instrumentally— on relations among inputs and outputs; similarly for conscious intentions. We are evidently a long way from static red and green sensory qualia. Hurley’s book is a work of formidable ambition and multi-disciplinary erudition. She marshals wide-ranging literatures in the philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory. Her Kant and Wittgenstein scholarship is also impressive. Each chapter stands on

Out of Africa: a report on the 13th World AIDS Conference.

The 13th World AIDS Conference held in Durban South Africa from July 9 to 14 2000 had “Break the Silence” as its theme and the silence was broken by songs drums presentations plenaries news reports banners films paintings posters theater and dance. In preparation for the conference hotel personnel received an AIDS101 and wore badges to reflect their achievement. Any report of this conference is biased. Were it to be written by any of the other members of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (ANAC) let alone someone from a different discipline or nationality a different perspective would emerge. Unlike Rashomon the play that portrays the perspective of three different people of the same event the report given here provides but one perspective. (excerpt)

A preliminary assessment of the function and conference service product at a UK stately home

The UK conference market is estimated to be worth £6 billion and is thought to be the fastest growing sector of the hotel industry. An increasing number of less conventional venues are aiming to attract corporate business, though most empirical research focuses on the hotel conference product. A UK stately home is the venue studied in this article. To identify possible areas for improvement, a telephone survey of customers was undertaken to assess the service and facilities. The high average ratings indicate that generally organisers have a favourable impression of the stately home. The research revealed significant differences in the average ratings given for the Main Hall and His Lordship's Apartment, the two rooms available for functions. Event category and organiser experience were not found to influence the ratings. Due to the relatively small sample size, only tentative observations are made about the trends which emerged from the analysis.

Which Side Are You On, APA?

Which Side Are You On, APA? Laurie Shrage (bio) The American Philosophical Association recently held one of its annual divisional meetings in a hotel in San Francisco whose workers had voted for a strike, were on strike call, and had called for a public boycott of the hotel. Both the APA Board of Officers and the Executive Committee (EC) of the Pacific Division failed to inform APA members and conference participants about the hotel situation in the months before the meeting, when they had this information. At the last minute, when several dissident APA members succeeded in getting information out to APA members around the country, many program participants were faced with crossing a boycott and possibly a picket line (hotel workers did picket the hotel on the first day of the meetings) to attend their sessions and fulfill other professional obligations. Some conference participants switched their room reservations to unionized hotels not on the union's boycott or strike list, and some managed to move their sessions to other venues, with the assistance of Pacific SWIP and the University of San Francisco Philosophy Department. Some philosophers simply boycotted the meetings and San Francisco. One philosopher who canceled his trip to San Francisco on hearing about the boycott told me that his grandmother would rise from her grave and strike him dead if he were to enter the conference hotel. His grandmother happened to be one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. At the alternative meeting sites in San Francisco, some philosophers shared stories of their pre-academic careers as waitresses, bartenders, cashiers, and, yes, hotel workers. Some recalled parents' and grandparents' union activism. But unfortunately, the large majority of philosophers I encountered were naïve and ignorant about worker struggles and management efforts to undermine and break strikes. Indeed, our own professional organization seemed to be collaborating with management by suppressing information about the boycott that union members were trying to get to philosophers, by supplying APA members with misinformation about the labor dispute, and by discouraging APA members behind the scenes from moving their sessions and meetings. In the week before the meetings, officers of the Pacific Division told anxious APA members they could honor the boycott by not spending money at the hotel, even though union representatives had told these officers, months before the meetings, that this [End Page 234] would not help their cause. The hotels can easily absorb some loss of revenue during a contract dispute, but what does force management back to the bargaining table is when organizations and individuals stop doing business as usual with the hotel and stop legitimating management's actions with their presence in the hotel. One officer of the Pacific Division was also telling members that, if we canceled our rooms, hotel workers would lose work—implying that hotel workers really needed a weekend's wages more than the health care benefits they are fighting to maintain. This paternalistic concern was offered despite the fact that the workers whom this officer aimed to protect had voted to go out on strike and risk not only losing wages but their jobs. It was their representatives who asked the APA to honor the boycott by moving our meetings. As philosophers, we like to think for ourselves and devise our own creative answers to critical problems. As Phil's comments show, philosophers can split hairs over the moral obligations posed by different kinds of union actions. Yet, while thinking independently is very valuable, sometimes we need to listen to others and act in union with them. Historically, collective bargaining and resistance are the primary tools workers have had for demanding humane treatment and working conditions. I believe that if philosophers had been given accurate information about this labor dispute and a chance to debate the issues, together we would have honored this boycott and made plans months before the meeting to move to another site, as the American Anthropological Association and Organization of American Historians did. Philosophers, as university and college faculty members, are employees or workers, and we work under vastly different conditions. Some faculty members are permanent employees and receive health care benefits and pensions. Many...

Profiling the Hotel and Conference Center Meeting Planner

Abstract Meeting planners are recognized leaders of the sweeping changes that have occurred in the hospitality industry in the last two decades (Raimondi, 1989). However, a review of professional and industry journals reveals a large disparity in the amount of attention afforded the corporate meeting planner in comparison to others in the profession, especially those in the hotel conference center arena. This article presents an overview of the evolution of the meeting planner and explores demographic data and current trends in the rapidly growing profession.

Telling Tales: Tales that are Telling

J L R Donna E. Alvermann Hoffman, NRC PRESIDENT 1991-1992 Duffy, Pearson, & Smith-Burke It is telling, I think, that most of us can vividly recall the first NRC meeting we attended. Sights, sounds, and the feel of the research paradigm then in vogue are indelibly etched in ways that lie dormant until the first week of December rolls around each year. For me, this week marks a time of contrasts. Nostalgic reveries slowly fade as I step into the foyer of the conference hotel and sense the excitement of the here and now of literacy research. For 4 days straight, I can count on having to make difficult choices as I juggle a schedule filled with not-to-be-missed sessions. Add to this mix the highly anticipated reunions with old friends (plus the opportunity to initiate new friendships), and it is easy to understand why NRC continues to be a mainstay in my professional life. Although the issues in reading research have changed dramatically over the years since I first joined the organization, the membership's ability to recharge itself has remained remarkably constant. This is telling in its own right.

Communication dynamics in the service encounter

The importance of service encounters for the purpose of creating and maintaining good customer relationships is widely recognised. This study focuses on the quality of face‐to‐face communication during service encounters between service providers and their customers at a help desk of a hotel conference department. Communication is believed to be influenced by the social activities that are pursued in a particular encounter. A stepwise method based on linguistic theory is developed to record, analyse and interpret transcriptions of verbal and non‐verbal behaviour by means of audio and video recordings. Utterances have been coded with regard to their function and content and are organised in a so called molecular coding scheme. This scheme models the dynamic interplay between communicators and makes it possible to analyse contextual influences on communication. It is believed that the approach advocated here could be of use for managers of service operations where communication is paramount.

The 1997 Alta Conference: Twenty Years in the Making

When the Tenth Biennial SCA/AFA Summer Conference on Argumentation convened on July 31, 1997, in the Wasatch Mountains at Alta, Utah, it was a conference twenty years in the making. The authors and critics polished their papers throughout the spring and early summer of 1997, the conference committee put all of the last minute touches on local arrangements, and conference director Jim Klumpp watched all the efforts come together, generated by the hard work that he and his conference committee have done over the last two years since the 1995 conference. But beyond all of these preparations stretches a history, a long gray line of committees, individuals, paper presenters, editors, and local arrangements committee members, who made the 1997 Alta Conference in reality the product of two decades of planning and evolution. The Alta Conference in fact had its beginning in 1976 when David Zarefsky, who then served as Chair of the SCA Forensics Division, appointed a planning committee to investigate the possibility of a summer conference in argumentation. Subsequent chairs of the division also continued to appoint committees for this purpose. These chairs included Donn W. Parson, J. Robert Cox, and David Thomas. By 1978 the University of Utah had been selected as host institution for the conference, and the American Forensic Association had joined the undertaking as a co-sponsor. At the time of the entry of the American Forensic Association into the conference planning, Gerald H. Sanders, then at the College of Wooster, was president of AFA. The reorganized planning committee then began its work in earnest at the Minneapolis convention of the SCA and AFA in the fall of 1978. After several months of planning and preparation, the first summer conference convened at Rustler Lodge in Alta, Utah, on July 26, 1979. Since 1979, the four-day format of the conference has remained, for the most part, little changed. Participants gather at Alta on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning of the conference, with a late lunch buffet being served upon arrival and with a keynote address either in the afternoon or evening on Thursday. Two days of heavily scheduled conference participation follow on Friday and Saturday, and over the years various efforts have been made to provide appropriate breaks in the afternoon and evening so that colleagues may digest the materials being presented to them and engage in scholarly interchange of ideas in a collegial fashion. There is typically very little actual conference business conducted on the Sunday on which the conference adjourns, and a concluding brunch is served at the conference hotel. While the format of the conference has not changed to any appreciable degree, and while the purpose of the conference remains fairy constant - to bring together interested scholars from around the world to share ideas about argumentation - there have been some significant changes in the scope of the Alta Conference over the years. One need only glance at the conference proceedings to learn some of the dimensions of change. While there has typically been, as befits the co-sponsorship by the American Forensic Association, a serious attempt to include a section on Argumentation and Forensics, there has been considerable variety in the other areas of interest at specific conferences. The first conference in 1979 featured three areas of interest: Argumentation and the Law, Argumentation Theory and Criticism, and Argumentation and Forensics. During the course of the conference in 1979 most of the conferees attended at least one session in each of the three areas. Conference planners hoped that this arrangement would allow for maximum choice between specialization and diversity of interests. While the practice of collegiality and the tone of the conference have continued as originally envisioned, an observer of the last several conferences might well conclude that there has been some falling away from the original intention of providing a series of programs designed to meet the general interests of all conferees attending. …

Hotel conference managers: skills and training needs in New Zealand

The paper reports the results of a survey of New Zealand conference managers working in hotels. It presents evidence of differences between their assessment of the importance of various skills, their training and their self ratings in those skills. The authors conclude that while gaps exist, tile main need for training might be in aiding managers to determine appropriate standards of performance rather than a need to remedy serious deficiencies in skill. Based upon responses to a questionnaire a suggestion for training is outlined.

Pacesetter English: Now That We're All Here, What Do We Do?

orking for the College Board or the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is an experience shared by many English teachers, usually in the form of participation in grading sessions for writing assessments or for the Advanced Placement tests. I thought that working on Pacesetter English would be something like that: wello .rganized, stro.ugly directed, intense, and short. It wasn't. It wasn't even at either the College Board or ETS. It was in a series of hotel conference rooms

Cumulative Encounter Satisfaction in the Hotel Conference Process

Prior studies of how service quality evolves during the service delivery process either have used aggregate case data or have not obtained objective measurements of the actual dimensions of the service encounter on an individual basis. Reports on a study of a service delivery process in a hotel. Its conference day guests rated the delivery process based on four distinct service encounters: arrival, coffee break, lunch and conference room. The aim was to investigate how quality factors were related to their respective encounters and how cumulative satisfaction levels impact on each other and over time. Average satisfaction levels for each of the four encounters were found to be significantly different. Moreover, there was a clear trend in the cumulative satisfaction results. Arrival resulted in high satisfaction, the coffee break was not as satisfying and lunch rated the worst. Satisfaction rose again after the conference room experience. A factor analysis of all the questions, for a hypothesized four‐factor solution, explained 72 per cent of the variation. All four encounters loaded highly and collectively on four distinct factors. Finally, a logistic regression model was used to rank the importance of the quality factors on their respective encounters. This information can be used to assist with the quality improvement of each encounter.

XXXI st Inter-American Bar Conference Hotel Caribe Hilton and Hotel Radisson Normandie

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Hotel Sales Management:

The process of hoteliers responding effectively to conference and function enquiries is examined. The complex decision-making process underlying hotel selection by conference and function organisers is considered, and the key features of a successful enquiry response are then outlined. An empirical study of the response of conference hotels to general telephone enquiries requesting information on their conference facilities and delegate tariffs is carried out, and the results suggest that many hotels may be missing opportunities to convert enquiries into sales.

International Coastal Symposium, held in the Hyatt Hotel Conference Centre on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, USA, during 6 to 11 June 1993

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Talk and Chalk: The Blackboard as an Intellectual Tool

Why does the classroom chalkboard persist in an electronic world? Should we free ourselves of this primitive technology, or is it still a useful tool? If the latter, why is it rare in business facilities, and in teaching spaces like hotel conference rooms where mid-career training occurs? These questions occurred to me as I spent several hours outside my own classroom in the space of a month (teaching a group of third graders how an airplane flies, watching some high school history and English classes, and being trained in media and press skills by the experienced staff of a large public affairs firm). Forced to cope with alternatives at conferences and invited presentations, I have long realized how much variation exists among the information-carrying capacities of the blackboard and its competition-the newsprint tablet on an easel, the slide projector, and the overhead projector. (For reasons that will become clear, when I speak of blackboards or chalkboards, I include wipe-off markerboards.) I only recently realized how differently a blackboard functions in the different institutions that use it, or even how diversely it is used by individuals similarly situated-for example, teachers in classrooms. Since I recall little conversation about this among colleagues, it seems worth recording some reflections on this venerable technology and its alternatives. The following is much in debt to the kind of exploration Erving Goffman demonstrated in Forms of Talk [1983] and elsewhere.

Special IAET Conference Hotel Rates

Special IAET Conference Hotel Rates

Assessing the Quality of the Conference Hotel Service Product: Towards an Empirically Based Model

This is the report of a study which has sought to take steps towards increasing both our knowledge of how consumers assess the service product offered by conference hotels, and, at the same time, our understanding of the dimensions of service quality and how they may be measured. The authors seek to show how their approach to measuring service quality was developed and refined. Some preliminary findings of the final stage of the study are presented, which identify the key elements that go to make up the perceived quality of the conference hotel service product, utilising the notion of ‘net service quality’.

The 1985 MTT-S International Microwave Symposium

St. Louis was the venue of the 1985 IEEE-MTT-S Microwave Symposium and Workshops. This was the first time that the Symposium was hosted in St. Louis and the first Midwestern meeting since the 1971 gathering in Arlington Heights, IL. The conference and associated events were held in the Cervantes Convention Center, a spacious downtown facility that comfortably accommodated both the technical meetings and the Exhibition. The Sheraton St. Louis Hotel served as the headquarters hotel. Five other major hotels were also occupied by conference participants. As our meeting has grown, it has become difficult to find a single facility that can provide suitable meeting and exhibition space and adequate hotel space as well. For that reason, we chose to locate at the Convention Center and use off-site hotels. Nearly continuous shuttle bus service was provided between the Center and the conference hotels. This was particularly helpful to many of the participants as St. Louis experienced a period of rainy weather during the meeting.

CONFERENCE VENUES: The Gain in Spain

A review of conference hotels in Marbella—with beautiful scenery and sandy beaches.