Can your hotel’s in-room safe fit a laptop? Can you pick up a phone signal everywhere in the meeting space? What’s the cost and speed of the in-room Internet service? A new technology site inspection checklist, TechSpec, covers all those issues and many more, and it is available free from meetings technology specialists Jim Spellos, CMP, and Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP.
The downloadable forms, released in September, serve as both a checklist and a worksheet, allowing planners to assign a score to the results of their site inspection. For example, if guest room Internet connectivity costs more than $10 per day, that category receives no points, while a cost of less than $10 per day gets two points, and free Internet gets five points. Of course the point values can be customized based on the needs of your group because the checklists are available in Microsoft Word and Excel formats.
Ball and Spellos hope to see their checklists used both by planners to assess and compare potential meeting sites and by hotels to gauge their tech readiness. They have created a TechSpec Facebook page where industry professionals can provide feedback on the forms for future updates.
The forms, available as a full version (guest rooms, meeting space, and lobby) or a guest-room version (guest rooms and lobby only), can be downloaded from both the Corbin Ball Associates Web site and Spellos’ Meeting U. Web site.