For meeting planners, the time-proven threat of being outsourced now has been joined by the double whammy punch of mergers and acquisitions. The latter often result in downsizing, staff reviews, and you guessed it--outsourcing...

TOOLS OF THE TRADE To fulfill her New Year's resolution to get organized, Kathy Kaskiw, FLMI, went to a hardware store and bought a toolbox...

GETTHERE, B-THERE, ANYWHERE The latest dot-com pairing will have Westport, Conn.-based b-there.com (www.b-there.com) offering its meeting planner users the opportunity to add a direct link to the air-booking capabilities of Menlo Park, Calif...

Dear Fellow ICPA Members: In addition to filling my role as Program Chair for this year's annual meeting, my next biggest challenge was an e-mail from Alison Hall asking me to write the President's Message before I'm officially President! The...

A couple of weeks before this issue, our Annual Technology Issue, was scheduled to go to press, I attended the Incentive Travel & Meeting Executives Show in Chicago. It was a well-timed step away from sitting at my computer writing about dot...

Let's Play Ball! Know who won the World Series in 1929? If you're a Mutual of Omaha agent, you probably do. Every year, the company runs a three-month Baseball Contest to boost summer sales. The prize? A trip to two World Series games. So what...

Here's the thing about cruising: It's not what you expect. People who haven't cruised often think of the ship as a kind of prison of boredom from which there is no escape. But those who try it for the first time are nearly always won over by an...

For the 10th year, Anne Erickson, director of insurance sales for Boca Resorts, Inc., hosted her All Girls Meeting Planner Weekend at one of the Boca properties: the Boca Raton Resort & Club in Boca Raton, Fla. Anne and the group set sail for...

IACVB'S MAJOR WEB INITIATIVE Members of the International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus turned out in large numbers at its annual meeting this summer, where CVB execs learned about the umbrella organization's new, for-profit Web...

First-Ever Weekend Meeting Wins Raves from ICPA Canadian Chapter The ICPA Canadian Chapter met in Montreal this summer for a first-time event that built a strong foundation for future programs...