So how much water should I drink while at a conference?

Last week, I talked about the importance of staying hydrated while at a conference – whether as an attendee or an organizer – and gave suggestions for how to do so. However, I did not mention how much you should drink, which begs the question of what the right amount of fluid intake is for a person attending a conference. The answer is – all together now – it depends.

Your body needs what it needs. This seemingly unhelpful piece of wisdom is actually quite appropriate when it comes to water consumption. Many people still believe that you need to consume eight to ten 8-ounce glasses of water each day to stay properly hydrated. However, the science behind that statement is completely lacking and, according to snopes.com, even nutritionists and physicians who specialize in water and hydration do not know where that “rule” came from.

If you lose 80 ounces of water throughout the day, then, yes, you need to take in roughly the equivalent of about ten 8-ounce glasses of water each day because you need to replace what you have lost. But even that figure is somewhat misleading. After all, (1) it doesn’t need to be water, though that is usually the best option; and (2) you actually can get much of your daily fluid intake from food as well.

How much water do you get from food? According to this article by the Mayo Clinic, your food typically accounts for about 20% of your daily fluid intake. If you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, then you are getting a higher percentage of water from your food than usual. The more water you get from your food, the less you need to actually drink.

What liquids, other than water, can you drink? Just about anything in a typical diet. Coffee, tea, juice, soda, milk – even beer and wine – can all count towards your daily intake of water since they are comprised primarily of water. Now, that is not to say that these are optimal replacements for water, nor should they make up a large portion of your total intake, but they do count towards the total – which is something usually ignored or overlooked by those pushing the “eight 8-ounce glasses of water” rule. Water is still generally the best choice, though: it is “calorie-free, inexpensive, and readily available” (Mayo Clinic; italics are mine).

Don’t forget, too, that other factors come into play as well. How physically active are you on a given day, what is the weather like, how humid is it, what physical conditions do you have, etc. are all key factors. These and other factors feed into the question of how much water you should drink daily. And the answer may be vastly different each day… Pay attention to what your body is telling you and, most of the time, you will be on track to drink enough water

~ Karl Baur, CMP • Project Director, RDL enterprises

Drink Up! The Importance of Staying Hydrated while at a Conference

Most people are aware of the basic facts about water consumption – the human body is approximately 75% water, you lose water throughout the day through normal activities and you need to take in a certain amount each day to replace what is lost, etc., etc. [Dehydration occurs when you take in less water than you lose, creating an imbalance.] However, many people are not aware of just how much even a little dehydration can reduce your effectiveness.

We all know that being thirsty is a sign of dehydration but did you know that even mild to moderate levels of dehydration can result in headaches, sleepiness, physical weakness, or dizziness? Higher levels of dehydration can become dangerous: irritability and confusion, low blood pressure, fever, and even loss of consciousness (Sources: Mayo Clinic and Medicine Net). Since we need to remain healthy and productive while managing an event, hydration is a key component that we cannot ignore.

Of course, you’d never let yourself become so dehydrated that you lose consciousness, right? You’d recognize it right away and drink more water, right? Maybe – but are you even aware of the symptoms and that dehydration is the reason you feel “off”? It is surprisingly easy to reach high levels of dehydration without realizing it – especially at a conference, and especially if you are the one “in charge” of the event. Why is that? I chalk it up to self-perception.

When I am onsite and the Lead for a conference, I become focused on all of the myriad details that need to me monitored to ensure a smooth-flowing event. The more details that need monitoring, the more focused I become on the needs of the event – sometimes to the point of forgetting my own needs (like eating and drinking). My focus (something needed, by the way) can get in the way of my ability to self-perceive my own condition. And this is not just something that I face. I have heard from other planners who have had similar experiences – and seen it occur in others as well.

Even attendees can suffer from dehydration. Have you ever been so busy that you “forgot” to eat lunch? (Be honest!) Conferences can be very busy affairs for the attendees as well as for the organizers. Packed event schedules can make even the most dedicated hydrator forget to drink up sometimes.

So, given that even low levels of dehydration can have negative effects on you, your work, and your moods, what can you do to combat dehydration at a conference (or anywhere for that matter)? Here are just a few ideas…

1. Set an alarm on your watch or phone to remind you to drink (and eat!) something. It does not have to be a lot – just enough to make sure that you are staying hydrated (or fed).

2. If you are onsite with other staff who work with you, remind each other periodically to get something to drink and/or something to eat. You may not realize you need it until someone says something to you. This is a technique my office uses with great success while onsite at meetings.

3. Keep a water station at your registration desk, in your onsite office, or wherever you will regularly see it. Having water in sight serves as a subtle reminder to regularly drink up.

4. If you are able, carry a water bottle with you as you make your rounds of the event, checking details, checking in with vendors, etc. Like having a water station in view, having a bottle of water with you can be a good reminder to stay hydrated. I know many planners who use this technique.

Don’t limit yourself to just these suggestions; find other ways to remind yourself to drink regularly throughout the day. Find what works for you – there is no one “right” way…

One final word of advice: don’t rely on just one method to remind you to stay hydrated. A single technique might fail. You could lose your water bottle (setting it down, then forgetting where you put it – or even that you had it) or miss/ignore your alarm. People can forget to remind you. But, if you have multiple reminders in place, the chances are much better that you will remember to drink plenty of water – and avoid any of the nasty effects of dehydration.

~ Karl Baur, CMP • Project Director, RDL enterprises

Why is hotel food so expensive?

Lately, there has been a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about government excess and the $16 muffins and $8 cups of coffee that the Department of Justice had at a couple of their events (Here is the article that touched it off). Mind you, the article leaves out a lot of details behind the numbers and, instead, focuses on the particular items that are sure to fire people up. After all, they need an attention-grabbing piece to sell the news and including the details explaining how those figures came to be would have turned off most readers. The Meeting Professionals International (MPI) blog posted a response to it here, so I won’t go into that particular issue.

However, I have heard complaints for many years – from conference attendees and funders, mostly – about how expensive hotel food is. It certainly seems that way. $8/person for a coffee break, $22/person for a lunch, $34/person for dinner – you can certainly eat quite well as an individual at those prices, especially when you find out that these prices are “plus-plus”. Let’s examine each of these examples one by one. I’ll start with dinner, since that is the one most often referenced in conversations on this topic.

Dinner, at a hotel, typically includes a soup and/or salad, bread, the entrée (with sides), dessert, and coffee service. All of that is included in the $34/person. Now it isn’t fair to compare this to a fast food joint, like McDonald’s or Carl’s Jr. The two types of meal service aren’t even close. Meals served at conferences are more like eating at a restaurant – and a moderately nice one at that. If I were to get the same menu items at a middle-of-the-road restaurant in the same city as my conference, the prices (before tax and tip) might break down like this:

• Soup (or Salad): $5
• Bread: usually included for free
• Chicken Entrée: $16
• Dessert: $7
• Coffee or Tea: $3

Add that all up and you have…$31. Suddenly, the hotel’s pricing does not seem so out of line as it did before, does it? Yes, it is still a bit higher, but it is not shockingly so, which is what most people react to.

Lunch is very similar to dinner. For a restaurant lunch comparable to what a hotel might serve, you’re looking at prices something along these lines:

• Soup (or Salad): $4
• Bread: usually included for free
• Sandwich Entrée: $10
• Dessert: $5
• Coffee or Tea: $2

The total for a similar lunch at a restaurant is…$21? Yep, we’ve saved an entire dollar compared to the hotel’s pricing. Not much of a difference there…

Finally, let’s look at the $8 coffee. Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to into it here but this is the one that seems to generate the most ire from certain folks and it is one area where your local coffee shop is way below the prices charged by hotels. Let’s look at in more detail…at $8/person for coffee service, what do you get? You get coffee service for a fixed amount of time (usually 1/2 hour), during which your attendees can pretty much drink as much coffee or tea as they want. How many of them do you think have just one cup?

When I order “in bulk” for coffee (to save money), I know that one gallon will give me 16-20 cups, depending on the size of the cups used by the hotel (see this post for more details). Will I order one gallon, then, for a group of 20 people? Probably not. I will want to have some extra available in case they drink more than I anticipated, even if this results in leftover coffee that no one drinks.

When ordering a break package, such as coffee service billed “per person” instead of by the gallon, the same principle is at work. The hotel does not want to run out of coffee (it makes them look bad), so they need to prepare more than they think people will drink. Plus, coffee service includes tea and decaf. The hotel needs to make sure that there is enough for people with those preferences as well. Your corner coffee shop (even Starbucks) can make coffee one gallon at a time and still promptly serve their customers. A hotel, trying to serve coffee to several hundred people all at the same time, must make much larger batches.

The upshot of all of this is that there is the potential for considerable leftovers (aka “waste”) with coffee service. Since the hotel must, at least, cover costs for providing it, they must take that into account – which results in higher prices. Even your corner coffee shop does this; their level of “lost product” is simply much smaller. In fact, every business that serves food must take wastage into account with their pricing or they will quickly be out of business. That’s basic economics.

So, does this mean that hotel food in not expensive? No, it’s still pricy – and I still think it’s expensive when I compare it to preparing a meal at home. However, when I compare it to eating out, I find that the prices are not too far off from what I would pay in a restaurant. Restaurants and hotel both need to cover not just the cost of the food, but also the costs of rent, equipment, staff wages, maintenance, and a myriad of other expenses that go into providing a service to the public – which means that it will always be more expensive than what it costs me to make the same dishes at home (assuming I even know how to make and have the time to make said dishes…).

So, the next time you hear a complaint about how expensive hotel food is, look at similar options before joining the chorus. You might find that the claims are right on track – or a bit overblown…

~ Karl Baur, CMP • Project Director, RDL enterprises

What are Base Prices and Inclusive Prices?

The simple answer (to me, anyway) is that Base Price and Inclusive Price are on opposite ends of the same equation – with tax and other charges in between. So how does that work if you are catering an event?

On a typical menu with catering pricing for a hotel, you will see a price listed next to each item or package. Often, that price is followed by a “++”. As discussed in my post on hidden charges, the “++” (or “plus-plus”) represents taxes and services charges that are added to the Base Price that is listed on the menu. If you cannot find the rates on the catering menus, ask your CSM for that information – you need to know it!

Now, let’s look at an example (warning – math ahead!)…

I’ve chosen to serve a dinner that is listed as $50 per person on the menu. Remember, that is the Base Price for my choice. For this example, taxes are 7.75% and the hotel will add a 20% service charge to the bill as well. That gives me an Inclusive Price of $64.65/person to serve that menu option. So how did I get to that number? Here’s the equation:

Inclusive Price = Base Price x (1 + Service Charge Rate) x (1 + Tax Rate)

Plugging numbers in yields…

Inclusive Price = $50 x 1.2 x 1.0775 = $64.65

So, if Base Price is the amount without tax and service charges figured in, then Inclusive Price is the amount with tax and service charge included.

Here is a simple price calculator that I’ve cooked up in Excel that you can download and play with. It will calculate either Inclusive Price from a known Base Price or Base Price from a target Inclusive Price. The only other information you’ll need to know is the tax rate and service charge amount and it will do the rest.

By the way, does the Inclusive Price appear excessive to you? If so you’re not alone. It seems that way to many people when they compare it to the cost of eating out. However, the same dynamic is at play there, too – people usually just aren’t consciously aware of it. The restaurant menu lists the Base Price for each item; you pay taxes on top of that, and tip on top of that. If you were to order a $50 meal, by the time you add tax and tip to the bill, your final tab will be similar to the amount calculated above (though, obviously, you can control how much to tip…).

~ Karl Baur, CMP • Project Director, RDL enterprises

Food and Beverage Minimums in Contracts

Those of you who have been in the industry a while will most certainly come up against food and beverage (F&B) minimums at some pointing your career and how you have handled them will likely have been determined by your client’s needs and the particular event’s specifications. For those of you who are new to meeting planning, F&B minimums can be a bit daunting.

So what is a food and beverage minimum and why would I allow them into my contracts? Well, the term itself is pretty self-explanatory – it is the minimum amount of food and beverage your group is committing to in the contract – but does not go far enough to capture all that the clause entails.

F&B minimums in a contract will nearly always be spelled out in terms of dollars to be spent on catering for your event. You are spending at least that amount of money, regardless of what you order or how many people actually attend. If I have an F&B minimum of $15,000, then my final catering bill will be at least $15,000. It is important to note, too, that the minimum is the base price, exclusive of tax and service charges. (For more on these “hidden charges”, check out this post.)

The hotel calculates the minimum based on the meal functions that you have planned and secured space for at the property. They also look at how many people are projected to attend those events. If the number seems unreasonable to you, do your own calculations based on your best information about the group and using the hotel’s own menus, then make a counter-offer to the hotel. Remember, like nearly any other clause in the contract, you can suggest changes and negotiate terms. When I see an F&B minimum in a draft contract, I will always do my own (realistic!) calculation of what I think my group will order – and try to get a lower number in the contract. This leaves me some “wiggle room” in case my numbers are not as high as I expect or if the client reduces the size of or cancels any particular function.

So why are those clauses even in the contract? Basically, this is a bit of self-protection for the hotels that arose out of the days when planners would book the sun and fail to deliver even the moon. Hotels needed to protect themselves from the unrealistic projections of planners. (OK, not all planners did this but enough did that the trend was very disturbing for hotels.) As a result, the F&B minimum was “born”. It allowed the hotel or caterer to make the planner be realistic in their projections of how much food they would actually order once the meeting occurred – and they enforced this by making the planner put their money where their mouth was. If you tell the hotel that you are doing a banquet for 100 people, then you need to be willing to commit close to that amount as the minimum. Planners quickly learned to look at their events a little more critically so that they could be more accurate in booking those events.

Don’t get upset when you see an F&B minimum in the contract, though do check the numbers carefully. Just as we as planners want certain protections in there, so, too, do the hotels and this is one protection I agree with. Though, as I mentioned earlier, I do work to ensure that the minimum requested is a realistic target for my group to hit. If I know my group is only likely to spend $5,000 in F&B, I will not sign a contract for any higher amount. Neither will I argue if the hotel wants to impose a $2,500 minimum, especially if I know my group can easily make that level.

~ Karl Baur, CMP • Project Director, RDL enterprises

Healthy Meeting Options – Beverages

The food and beverage choices that you make as a planner can have a huge impact on your attendees. In fact, the food that someone has at a conference can be remembered long after the event is done and that memory may even last longer than whatever they learned in the actual sessions! So what can you do to help your attendees to have a healthier meeting? We have previously discussed healthy options for food; this time, let’s take a look and the other half of that pairing – beverages.

1. One of the most obvious ways to help people drink healthier is to provide water for the meeting participants. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I have been to plenty of meetings where water was not provided. Be sure to provide water at your meetings. The next big question is whether to serve water in pitchers or bottles. I will stay out that debate here, though I will say that I have heard compelling arguments for both sides of the debate. Suffice to say that which one you choose may come down to personal preference, event budget, or other factors as much as it may be driven by environmental concerns.

2. Provide non-caloric options, such as tea and coffee. Remember, these drinks are only non-caloric so long as you do not add anything else to them, which brings us to the next option…

3. Choose nonfat or low-fat milk for folks to use in their coffee or tea.

4. While I have never been able to completely eliminate soda from the day’s menus, it is possible to offer healthier options here, too. Vegetable juice, fruit juice (100%, please!), unsweetened teas, and even carbonated waters are all good options here.

5. Finally, exercise portion control. Yes, this is possible with drinks (bars do it all the time). Asking the hotel or caterer for smaller cups (an 6.4 ounce cup instead of an 8 ounce or larger mug, for example) means that, at minimum, an attendee needs to walk a bit more to get the same amount of beverage, which burns that many more calories. It may not seem like much, but it does add up.

Providing healthier options for beverages at a meeting may seem like it would yield only minimal benefits - and that may be true if it is the only approach used. However, when used in conjunction with healthier meal options and increased exercise during meetings, it can greatly support the overall goal of healthier meetings.

~ Karl Baur, CMP • Project Director, RDL enterprises