Category Archives: Travel

I’m in Barcelona, Spain this week working on a relatively small meeting.  It’s a pretty simple job, but made more difficult due to slow communication from the hotel where we are holding the meeting.

As with all of the meetings I am responsible for, the first thing I do is go to the property website for where the meeting will be held.  Most every hotel and meeting space these days has a page for floor plans & capacity charts, and this one was no different.  What was different is that even with a web page titled FloorPlans & Capacity Chart, there were no floor plans.  This isn’t necessarily a show stopper as most of the drawings available on line from hotels are wildly inaccurate – omitting columns, door locations, chandelier locations, etc – and I usually request better drawings from someone at the hotel who can provide me with more accurate information.

At the very least, even a poor drawing will give me some idea of what I am dealing with, but in this case all I had to go with was the dimensions listed on the capacity chart, 62 ft x 56 ft x 13 ft.  That would be length, width and height.  No idea where doors might be or what other obstructions may be in my way.

Twice I called the hotel and asked for some room drawings.  The first time I called I was told that they don’t share the floor plans except with people who are contracted to hold a meeting there – which is pretty stupid because we can’t always tell if the space will work for us or not without a floor plan.  I would be hesitant to commit to anything without getting some idea of the room.  (Some of the meeting planners I work with are famous for sending me requests like “How many people can I fit in a room that’s 5,200 square feet?”  Well that depends, are we talking about a square, a rectangle or a hallway?)  I managed to convince them to agree to email me something, but after a few days went by with nothing from the hotel I tried calling again.

For two days I couldn’t get through, and then when I did I asked for their email so that I could send a request directly.  (At this point I didn’t have a hotel contact, as my company hand’t actually signed a contract with the hotel, so no one was assigned to our meeting.)  A few more days and a weekend went by and I called again and was told that they had my email, but where too busy with other clients to respond right away.

Then it turned out that files they were trying to send kept bouncing back to them so they had to save them in a different format.  Two weeks before the actual meeting I finally get an email with about 11 attachments.  We’re using most of the rooms for breakouts, but it is the large space I am mostly concerned with, so I go directly for that file and open it.  Turns out that the image that was labeled as the large room was instead a floor plan for another floor in the hotel with six of the smaller rooms.  Then I looked at another file that was sent, and it is the same image.  Turns out all of the files were of the same thing, even though they were all named differently.  Obviously they had some issues while trying to convert the original files.

Another weekend goes by, and then the Monday before I am scheduled to fly out I get a .doc file with an image of a CAD drawing pasted into it.

Obviously this is not your standard rectangular room.  Now I have to figure out where the hotel got it’s dimensions that it posted online as it’s obviously not a simple rectangular room.  To be fair, the hotel was conservative in it’s published dimensions, as it essentially listed the dimensions for the “square” section to the right of the drawing, but even those dimensions are off.  This drawing I did makes the meeting space a little clearer.  I took my own measurements of the dimensions once I arrived, so this is an accurate room drawing.

So now a week before flying out I have a real idea of what the room looks like and now I can begin laying out where staging, screens, audio, lighting, and seating will go and can let the meeting planner know how many people they can realistically expect to fit in the room.  What a lot of people don’t take into account, especially when dealing with just the square footage, is the ceiling height.  Sure, I might be able to fit 300 people in your room, but the ceiling height will only let me put in 7.5′ x 10′ screens, which means only the first 200 people will really be able to read the text on the screens – everyone in the back rows will be squinting and struggling to read the content.

So I sent my list of requirements and a floor plan of the set up I wanted to the hotel about 3 hours after getting their drawing.  Now this was an amended list of AV requirements as I had sent a list the previous week so that the hotel could give their AV supplier an idea of what we would be needing and to make sure they had it available as we have a total of 17 breakout rooms in addition to the main meeting, each requiring basic AV gear.  My amended list took into account the limitations of the actual room and scaled back some of the gear as final details where falling into place.

It was another two days before I heard back from the hotel, but only to find out that my email had been unread and I still had no idea what, if any, gear I would be getting.  Finally, a week before the actual meeting I received a photo of the room (the first after many requests for one) from a previous set up to show what they were proposing to provide.  I made a few adjustments to their proposal and told them to send me an updated list and price quote.

Finally, on the day I was flying out, I got a list confirming my gear request and an incomplete cost quote.  A few more emails later to confirm that I would have at least one technician who spoke english and I was comfortable that I could pull this off.

Here is our finished set up, and it’s ok for what it is.  Had we more time I would have done something different, but this is strictly a medical meeting, so it’s low on the glitz and flash that we provide for some sales meetings.

Ordinarily we contract with a different AV supplier while in Spain (Grup Jaume Muntaner who I’ve used before) but this was a short notice meeting and there would not have been time to get proper payment in place for an outside supplier, so the hotel’s provider was what we had to deal with.  This is often not the best option for us as they usually don’t have the resources to support some of the larger shows we do, and often don’t have the skilled staff we need.  Fortunately this group is pretty good, but because they are the hotel provider I had to go through the hotel for all communications instead of being able to go directly to the vendor.  Had I been able to communicate directly with the AV supplier I probably would have had all of my stuff in place weeks before.

But it hasn’t been all bad.  On my last trip to Barcelona my friend from Grup Jaume Muntaner told me about his favorite bar to go to, but he warned us to get there early.

This is the Cerveceria el Vaso de pro, roughly translated into Brewery of the Golden Glass.  On that last trip we got there too late to get in the door (around 9pm), so we found another place for dinner, then came back later.  We managed to squeeze in closer to midnight, ordered a beer and then watched them prepare some of the most amazing food that even after a large meal we had to order.  We ended up closing the bar that night and enjoying some fantastic tapas.

You can see here how small this place is.  The wall on the left is the outside wall shown in the previous photo and we were against the side wall.

We were determined to make this our first stop once we got settled in at the hotel, and it did not disappoint.  One of my favorite items on their menu (besides the beer) is their Brave Potatoes, which are spicy potatoes.

Other places in Spain serve these, but about half the time it’s french fries with the spicy sauce, other times it’s a form of spicy ketchup.  These are the best spicy potatoes I’ve had in Spain – they are wonderful.  But we didn’t just have potatoes, we also had some other traditional tapas before leaving.

The only challenge to this place is that it’s a neighborhood bar a little off of the tourist path, so it doesn’t cater much to English speaking customers.  They are very welcoming, though, even if we do have a hard time deciphering their menu.