If companies don’t want to, or can’t hold their meetings in the usual destinations, why can’t local clubs serve as very attractive and reasonable alternatives?
If AIG held trademark rights that would pay it a dollar for every time someone in the travel or hospitality industry now makes reference to the “AIG effect,” it could pay the government back, with interest, tomorrow. Barely an hour goes by now where I don’t either get sent an article lamenting how “the effect” is strangling the resort and events industries, or a press release from a hotel or resort or spa property that’s now trying to market itself as the anti-AIG. (I actually got one from a hotel that boasted, “We have better numbers this year because of our ability to avoid ‘the AIG effect’ or be labeled as ‘lavish’ or a ‘resort.’)
The term, in case you’ve been holed up for the past six months in a Motel 6 with no phone or TV service, refers to the lasting effects from the backlash and uproar that occurred last year when word leaked out that AIG was holding a sales retreat at a posh California resort at the same time it was insisting it needed a government bailout. Those who believe “the effect” is real say the fallout from that PR faux pas has extended so far that it’s brought virtually all corporate meeting business to a screeching halt, as no organization now wants to risk getting caught doing anything that would appear to be similarly excessive in an era characterized by ripoffs, layoffs and angry consumers telling big business to get off. “The effect” is also being blamed for the current shutdown of virtually all major hotel and resort construction projects.
(As an aside before we go any further, I do have to wonder why AIG couldn’t have just held its retreat at Stowe Mountain Resort in Vermont, which it owns and we featured in our February issue. It’s a hell of a nice place where they certainly could have had a great meeting and saved themselves a lot of grief in the process.)
Anyway, I think the truth is more likely that the “AIG effect” is just a another way of saying “the economy’s been in the toilet.” I don’t think it will prove to be anything close to a lasting effect once things do turn around again. People are still going to see the value, both personally and for business, of going off-site and rewarding good performers with well-deserved getaways.
In the meantime, it seems to me clubs may be in a great position to capitalize on “the effect” while it is still making its presence felt (i.e., the economy is still sluggish and companies and organizations are operating with thin budgets). If corporations don’t want to, or can’t, hold their meetings in the usual destinations, why couldn’t local properties serve as very attractive and reasonable alternatives—with little risk of backlash, especially if the organizations that are using them have membership connections?
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