As I read the e-mail that was sent from the association office requesting input from the members, I wondered what it was that I could contribute to the membership that would be worthwhile. After much thought, it occurred to me that the majority of the membership consists of call center executives and they probably don’t know too much of what my job entails. So I decided what better way to educate everyone than to chronicle a day in my life at the Greater Milwaukee Convention and Visitor’s Bureau?? 

First, let me tell you that I am the Convention Housing Coordinator at the bureau and that I reserve rooms for convention attendees only. The minimum requirement for our housing services to be offered to a meeting planner is that the convention must occupy at least three hotels and have at least one thousand rooms reserved on the peak night of the convention.  In addition, I take no reservations over the telephone, there is no leisure housing that is handled by this department, and I am entitled to only one nervous breakdown per year and that can occur only after our busy summer season! 

Secondly, everyone needs to imagine that it is now thirty days prior to the start of a citywide convention that has filled all of the downtown hotels. This is typically when the “cut-off” date for the housing bureau is. (In other words, if there are any rooms that have not been reserved, the roomblocks are released back to each individual hotel and would now go back into their general inventory). Keep in mind that there are other conventions that we are working on, while we are trying to ‘close’ this one. Okay, now I think everyone has the idea! I’ve had my Wheaties and downed a pot of coffee to face a new day of challenges, so here goes: 

8:00a.m. Welcome to the start of another glorious day at the GMCVB!
8:05a.m. Listen to the thirty voice mail messages that have collected while the office has been closed. 
8:30a.m. Start returning those thirty phone calls, in between the new phone calls that are coming in. 
8:45a.m. Verify that all of the acknowledgments that were processed yesterday for the auto-fax system were sent out during the night. For those that didn’t go through – we’re off to the fax machine. 
9:00a.m. Begin running the final rooming lists for all of the hotels, for the reservation managers to compare to their “master” list, all the while praying that there haven’t been too many reservations that have fallen into that “reservation black hole” and have gotten mysteriously lost! 
10:00a.m Don’t forget to attend the Services Department meeting! 
11:00a.m. Oh look, more voice mail messages while you were gone!
11:05a.m. Begin processing some of the housing forms that have arrived either via fax or mail. These are the people that have waited until the last minute and want the concierge level rooms at the headquarter hotel for the convention. They will be one of your voice mail messages as soon as they receive their acknowledgment indicating that they have been placed at an airport hotel because everything else is sold out! 
11:30a.m. The meeting planner called – she would like a copy of the room inventory status report to see how the hotels picked up. Not a problem –  I’ll fax that right off! 
12:00p.m. Lunch? Maybe later – I have to print the deposit reconciliation report and balance all of the deposits we received for each respective hotel and send that to accounting to have the deposit checks printed.
12:30p.m. The meeting planner (for the convention coming in six months from now) would like to proof a copy of the housing form that they will be using. Could I e-mail that to him right away?? 
1:00p.m. Don’t forget to get those invitations mailed out for the Reservation Manager’s meeting scheduled for next month! 
1:30p.m. Lunch? Maybe later – the room pick-up reports are starting to be faxed back in from the hotels for the convention that just finished up last week. The meeting planner has requested the final room pick-up report be faxed to her by the week’s end. Hopefully the hotels will get their information back in a timely fashion! 
2:00p.m It looks like it will be ‘vending machine surprise’ for lunch again! “Working lunch” means you burn the calories off while you sit at your desk, right?? Now would be a good time to print off any acknowledgments that have been processed for today – and get them down to the mailroom by 4:00p.m.! I wish everyone had a fax machine….. 
2:30p.m. Gather all of the reports you will need to attend the pre-conference meeting for the group that’s coming in at the end of the week. It should be relatively short, not too many issues to go over. 
3:15p.m. Time to download all of the reservations that will be processed by the auto-fax system, sending out the acknowledgments this evening. Isn’t technology wonderful?! 
4:00p.m. Oh my – look at all of that filing piling up! May as well get started – the stack of housing forms only gets bigger if left unattended! Now if I could only remember how to twitch my nose the right way and have them all find their proper place….. 
4:15p.m. Accounting has just returned those deposit checks – I’m off to hand-deliver them to the hotels. I shouldn’t be gone too long – hopefully traffic isn’t too bad yet! 
4:45p.m. Time to start wrapping things up – maybe I can answer a few more of those voice mail messages before calling it a day! 
5:00p.m. The meeting planner just called – oops, it seems that she has overlooked one of her speakers – see what I can do to get him a suite at the headquarters hotel for the peak night of the conference?? She’ll wait for my return call... 

Whew! Well, you’ve now experienced a whirlwind tour of my daily life as a Convention Housing Coordinator! Obviously, I have packed a lot of information into a small timeframe to give you a general idea of the things that I can be challenged with on a day-to-day basis! 

I’m sure that any one of you reading this article could have written something very similar to it. Were it not for the love of these exact challenges, and the satisfaction of getting those  reservations ‘just right,’ I’m quite sure that all of our offices walls would have been padded a long time ago! 

Hazel Reid is Housing Coordinator for the Greater Milwaukee Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.