GERI SCHMID, a travel account manager for Carlson Marketing Group in Minneapolis, has been with the company on and off since 1969 — back in the days when “Orlando hadn't even been invented,” she jokes.

Where did groups go in those days? La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, Calif., was “a huge incentive destination,” Schmid recalls. Miami, Caribbean cruises, Acapulco, Hawaii for planners with big budgets — all of those made Schmid's list. If her clients wanted to go overseas, they headed for Switzerland, London, Paris, Munich, and occasionally Spain.

In 1987, Corporate Meetings & Incentives surveyed 169 corporate decision-makers on their preferred destinations. Hawaii was clearly the favorite, followed by the Caribbean, California, Florida, and the Bahamas.

What about today's emerging markets: South America, South Africa, Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe? By 1996, CMI was talking up emerging destinations such as Morocco, Russia, and southern Africa. And as early as 1991, we predicted that as major hotel companies continued to expand their operations in countries such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the then-Soviet Union, and as Eastern Europe became better equipped for incentive travel, it would become “one of the world's hottest new destinations.” And it has.

On the following pages, we've compiled seven of the most significant trends (in no particular order) affecting site selection in the past 25 years. Enjoy the journey!

1. DISNEY ENTERS THE MARKET

   THAT ORLANDO'S WALT DISNEY WORLD is one of the industry's top meeting and convention spots is no shocking revelation. What does seem surprising, in retrospect, is that Disney's presence in the meeting and convention market was fairly minimal as late as 1990.

   “The amount [of business] was so small, it was almost negligible,” says George Aguel, senior vice president, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

   In the late 1980s, Disney executives determined that the last 10 years of the millennium would be the “Disney Decade” — a period that would see the dramatic expansion of the company's resorts and theme parks — particularly at Walt Disney World. And one of the important events that defined how that expansion would take place was Disney's entry into the meeting market, which Aguel says was planned in the late 1980s.

   It was through his experience with Nashville's Opryland that Aguel saw the kinds of business opportunities available in the meeting industry. With Disney's highly recognizable brand and willingness to invest in its facilities, Aguel realized early on that demand within the industry for the Disney product “would be significant.”

   The first major step was the 1990 launch of the twin Yacht and Beach Club resorts, the first Disney World resorts to incorporate the facilities needed to attract substantial meetings. That was followed by the expansion of the Contemporary and Grand Floridian resorts, as well as moves to make theme parks such as MGM Studios, Epcot, and the Magic Kingdom more group-friendly. And the 1997 launch of the Coronado Springs Resort — a family/convention center resort — provided Disney with the largest ballroom in the southeastern United States and, Aguel says, made a statement about Disney's desire to be a major player in the meeting market.

   With the addition of new venues and facilities within Disney's resorts and theme parks, as well as continued plans to expand (a new 86,000- square-foot exhibit hall is planned for Coronado Springs), “it's a continuous process for us,” Aguel says. “The only thing we know that is constant at Disney is that we'll continue to keep growing.”

2. LAS VEGAS RISES

   BY THE LATE 1980s, Las Vegas was in what Bill Thompson calls a “flat” period. Revenue was down, the city was facing increasing competition from Atlantic City, an outmoded convention center dated to 1959, and a new casino hadn't been built since 1972.

   “We were complacent,” says Thompson, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an expert on the gaming industry. “But when Indian and riverboat gambling started to come into play, this place woke up and took off.”

   The opening of the 3,000-room Mirage Hotel-Casino in 1989 inaugurated the age of the megaresort in Las Vegas, and what had been strictly a tourist destination fast became the country's premier convention city.

   With nine of the 10 largest hotels in the United States and three of the best convention centers, along with excellent restaurants, shopping centers, museums, and fabulous entertainment, Las Vegas is a city with a level of amenities that equals any place in the world, Thompson says.

   Meeting planners agree — they brought 4 million meeting attendees to the city in 2002. “And Las Vegas just keeps on growing,” says Thompson. “We're getting ready for another boom.”

3. HAWAII — NOT JUST FUN IN THE SUN

   THE ALOHA STATE has always been a premier, if the not the top, domestic incentive destination. A construction boom in the 1980s, highlighted by the launching of the massive 1,244-room Waikoloa Resort in 1988, marked the rejuvenation of the state's travel and tourism infrastructure, a trend that continued into the 1990s and beyond.

   Hawaii actually has a long relationship with the meeting industry. A look through the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau's archives shows that the state has been a meeting destination for more than 100 years, according to Michael Murray, director of sales for the Hawaii VCB. Even with that history, the number of meeting attendees visiting the islands 20 years ago as a percentage of total arrivals “was a lot lower than today,” he says, adding that the construction of new resorts and ballrooms, and, most significantly, the building of the Hawaii Convention Center in 1998, have “shown Hawaii's real commitment to this market.”

   Hawaii's international flair, its diversified economy, expanding technology base, and location between the mainland United States and Asia have ideally placed it within the new global economy. The islands are no longer just for the leisure traveler, Murray says, “We also have a serious business message.”

4. CONFERENCE CENTERS: THEN AND NOW

   BUILT IN 1885 and given National Historic Landmark status in 1966, the Arden House in Harriman, N.Y., has one other singular claim to fame: It is considered to be America's first conference center.

   Although conference centers have since become a prominent feature of the meeting mix, that wasn't quite the case 25 years ago.

   The International Association of Conference Centers was formed in 1981 with 28 active members. While that number did not represent the entirety of the conference center universe 24 years ago, IACC did grow rapidly, hitting the 100-member mark by 1986.

   What marked the typical IACC member 25 years ago? “They were more purist in 1981 — they all had the same basic mission, doing conferences we consider to be average-sized,” says Tom Bolman, executive vice president of IACC. “And they did no transient business.”

   As conference centers grew in popularity in the 1980s, one major development was the idea of the resort conference center. But many of these resorts dropped the concept by the early 1990s, Bolman says, as they found that they were using their centers simply as overflow meeting space. (An article in CMI in 1991 reports that these centers were also suffering “image problems.” With the country in recession, planners were having trouble selling the idea of bringing meetings to “resort” conference centers.)

   By the late 1990s, hotels in numbers began to add ancillary conference centers, which have accounted for IACC's largest area of growth over the past dozen years.

   “My sense is that the conference center 20 years ago hadn't developed the cachet it has now,” Bolman says. But with the development of universal standards criteria and IACC's high saturation of the commercial conference center market, conference centers, Bolman believes, have cemented their place as serious players in the meeting market.

5. MEETINGS GO SPA-CRAZY — BUT WHATEVER HAPPENED TO TENNIS?

   WHAT IS AN INCENTIVE MEETING without a trip to the spa? Well, it wasn't always that way.

   “One of the first questions we ask now is whether they [hotels and resorts] have a spa,” says Carlson's Geri Schmid. “We never asked that 25 years ago.”

   By the early 1990s, a renewed interest in fitness and wellness led to steady growth of new spa and fitness facilities in resorts and hotels. An August 1991 article in CMI noted that “Those who thought that the growing emphasis on fitness was just a phase have been proven wrong. Hotels, resorts, conference centers, and even cruise ships have impressive fitness facilities and spas that are constantly busy.”

   What was at first steady growth in the construction of spa facilities turned into an explosion about five years ago. According to figures supplied by the International SPA Association, there are now 1,662 resort/hotel spas in the United States. This represents almost a fourfold increase over the 473 resort/hotel spas in service in 2000. The 37.2 million visits to resort/hotel spas in 2004 accounted for $4.5 billion in revenue — eight times the $571 million reported in 2000.

   But while spa services are definitely in, tennis is most assuredly out.

   Look at a 1980s issue of CMI and you're bound to find some mention of golf and tennis and their popularity with corporate meetings. While golf retains its position as an after-business staple, tennis has all but disappeared.

   “It used to be that when we were going to do sports activities, it was always golf and tennis — we'd do round-robin tournaments and clinics,” Schmid says. “Now we rarely have tennis [although] we may reserve a court for free play for older groups.”

6. THE ADA MAKES ITS MARK

   WHEN THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT went into effect in 1992, it marked “the date that the architecture of American commerce underwent a dramatic, if subtle, transformation,” we said.

   The part of the act that has had the most impact on the meeting industry is Title III, which prohibits discrimination against disabled persons by those who operate facilities such as hotels, restaurants, arenas, and public gathering places — in short, the kinds of facilities that are used by corporate meeting planners. And it's not only the facilities that are liable — the organizations that use those facilities assume responsibility for handicap accessibility as well.

   When it comes to the ADA and meetings, the result has been a “parsing” of the responsibilities of compliance, says Jed Mandel, a lawyer with Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg in Chicago. Planners have generally complied with the needs of their disabled attendees, whether it's through providing interpreters for the hearing-impaired or printing handout materials in Braille. Facilities, on the other hand, have dealt with the physical aspects of compliance, whether it's ensuring that staircases are wide enough or sinks low enough to make them accessible to people in wheelchairs.

   When the act went into effect, there was, Mandel says, “some trepidation” among meeting professionals, particularly with the sense that the disabled, as a potential group of plaintiffs, “can be pretty aggressive.”

   It is perhaps a testament to the ability of the industry to implement the act that Mandel knows of no “horror stories” related to ADA litigation. “There has been a cooperative spirit in implementing greater accessibility.”

7. RADISSON DIAMOND — AHEAD OF ITS TIME?

   IN THE EARLY 1990s, Radisson Hotels and Finland's Diamond Cruise Inc. decided to fill what they saw as a gap in the market by appealing specifically to meetings and incentives. Until then, groups that used cruise ships had no dedicated meeting space or business amenities.

   So, in May 1992, they launched the revolutionary Radisson Diamond, a twin-hulled ship designed solely to handle the growing group market. With a 3,300-square-foot conference center and a full business center, it truly had the feel of a hotel at sea. It was the first of what was a planned rollout of at least three ships. The other two were to be named the Ruby and the Sapphire.

   But, in the words of Andrew Poulton, director of strategic marketing for Radisson Seven Seas Cruises, the Radisson Diamond was fated to remain “a one-ship company.”

   The problem? “The numbers didn't work out as planned,” says Poulton. Company executives discovered fairly quickly that the demand for year-round group incentive and meeting charters was not there, and within a year the business mix had been changed. By 1995, the Radisson Diamond had merged with Seven Seas Cruises, and today, incentives and meetings account for about one-third of the ship's business.

   While the Radisson Diamond is no longer used specifically for the meeting market, “it certainly was a pioneer,” Poulton says. With its twin hulls (making the ship more stable for meetings), large number of conference rooms, and standardized accommodations, the fact remains, he adds, that “whoever designed the ship had a lot of foresight.”

Luxe Without Limits

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, high-end incentives weren't just luxurious, they were decidedly over the top.

Geri Schmid, a travel account manager with Carlson Marketing Group of Minneapolis, distinctly recalls one such trip she planned in 1978. “It was one of the more fantastic trips I ever did,” she says. Attendees were flown first-class to New York City, put up in suites at the Plaza Hotel, taken to the theater, and entertained at a gala dinner.

Then the fun really began.

The group was ferried to Cherbourg, France, on the Queen Elizabeth 2, put up at the George V Hotel in Paris, flown back to Washington, D.C., on the Concorde, entertained with another gala dinner, and finally returned to their home airports — again, first-class.

“That was in 1978,” Schmid says. “Imagine what that would cost today. That was a corporation that really believed in the value of incentives!”