CASE STUDY: Radisson Blu's Experience Meetings

The upscale European hotel brand, part of Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, has launched a new approach to meetings, designed to improve the experience and boost revenue from MICE

Last month, Europe’s largest upscale hotel brand Radisson Blu launched a new concept for meetings and events called ‘Experience Meetings’. Part of Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Radisson Blu is rolling the programme out at 255 participating hotels covering more than 2200 meeting rooms in 55 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Experience Meetings comprises three key elements. The first is ‘Brain Food’; an innovative and responsible approach to F&B developed by skilled chefs and nutritionists.

Brain Food serves fresh, well-balanced and primarily locally-sourced low-fat and low-sugar items that keep the guests’ blood sugar level constant and help them to stay concentrated and to lower their stress level.

The second is the ‘Brain Box’ — a breakout room for participating hotels designed to elevate efficiency and to stimulate creativity. The Brain Box is equipped with a flexible furniture layout with movable lounge chairs and cushions, as well as adjustable light systems and special tools like plexi-glass walls to write on.

The third element is to enable connectivity: all Radisson Blu properties offer free, fast wifi for delegates.

Intangible components are aimed at complementing the new meeting concept, such as Radisson Blu’s ‘yes I can’ service philosophy. Guests can also participate in engaging Responsible Business activities such as paperless meetings.

Furthermore, members of Radisson Blu’s loyalty programme Club Carlson for Planners will benefit from an automatic offset of the carbon dioxide emissions from any meeting that a member has booked.

Here, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group global director of sales and marketing Yigit Sezgin offers further details on the initiative and its objectives.

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Rationale and objectives
Experience Meetings is a new meeting and event concept to revitalise the positioning of Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group’s brands in the important meetings, incentives, conferences and events (MICE) arena, and to crucially differentiate the Radisson Blu offerings from those of its competitors.

The intiative is designed to provide meeting planners and delegates with the highest level of consistent product and service delivery, according to Sezgin.

It also forms part of Rezidor’s Route 2015 programme to improve the group’s profitability through revenue initiatives, cost savings, asset management activities and plans to further grow its fee-based hotel portfolio.

Sezgin explains: “Over the past six months, we have really stepped up our game to fuel the revenue passion. Experience Meetings, created jointly by different departments at the corporate support office and selected hotels, is our new approach not only to attract more MICE business to our hotels but to exceed expectations of our clients, and make them return over and over again.    

“Radisson Blu has always provided services and facilities that cater to the business persona and meetings delegate. We have now brought all these existing service elements under one umbrella and added unique and new elements,” he continues, adding that the group wanted to ‘breathe some life back into meetings’, hence the new Brain Box room.

The concept and investment
The operator has revised its Standards of Operations & Services, incorporating lots of ‘good ideas’, ‘useful tips’ and ‘wow factors’ according to Sezgin.

Specific brand guidelines and collateral have also been developed incorporating a new look and feel, including the redesign of meetings and events pages on radissonblu.com and the successful launch of regional F&B training for Brain Food across Carlson Rezidor’s portfolio of Radisson Blu Hotels and Resorts, which is ongoing.

Other new or updated tools introduced as part of the initiative include: The M&E Success Factors operational handbook; marketing and sales guidelines detailing the new look and feel, as well as key concept components; F&B manuals containing operations guidelines, standards and recommendations, as well as Carlson Rezidor’s Brain Food Kit, and other meetings and events implementation guidelines and visuals.

“As part of our company Route 2015 we’re aiming to achieve an incremental revenue of €120 million (US $154 million) by 2015. We aim for €30 million ($39 million) of this to come directly from sales, especially the MICE segment,” reveals Sezgin.

The programme
All of Carlson Rezidor’s Middle East hotels will take part in the initiative.

“They will be introduced to the full concept next week [October 24] at the official launch at the Radisson Royal Hotel [in Dubai], this will be their chance to experience the new concept first hand from the Brain Box room to the Brain Food,” he explains.

The Brain Food training has already begun, with a regional trainer appointed.
Furthermore,Sezgin says all of Radisson Blu’s chefs in the region have completed the Brain Food training: “We’re looking forward to seeing a successful launch of Experience Meetings across the region. Each individual hotel can add their own twist,” he adds.

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Didier Gusching, Executive chef at Radisson Blu and Park Inn Hotels, Abu Dhabi Yas Island
The new Experience Meetings concept is translated through our refreshment break and lunch offerings.

It is a good guideline for us as we can take into consideration the local produce available to us and seasonality. Yet we can adapt to the market demands with little impact on our day-to-day operations.

It is an opportunity to promote our company practice and values whilst educating different markets. We do expect an overall increase in revenue. But given the other components of the concept it gives a more marketable and trendy MICE package.

Dajana Stanitzok, Cluster director of meetings and events, Radisson Royal Hotel Dubai & Radisson Blu
Experience meetings is a very creative, new, young and fresh concept. Research has shown that the environment you are in plays an important role in regards to the learning process.

I believe with Experience Meetings all the various elements will play an important role and create a huge impact on the standard meeting but even more so when it comes to training events.

Experience Meetings also gives us more creative and innovative opportunities when organising events together with our clients. The concept itself matches with our modern design and outlook.

Yigit Sezgin, Global director of sales and marketing, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group
We’ve already launched Experience Meetings in Russia and Scandinavia; in both places we’ve had a great response, we expect a similar response when we fully launch in the Middle East. Meetings and incentives has always been a big focus for us as a hotel group.

We already had several key service concepts and elements that we were utilising during our MICE events.

What Experience Meetings has done has taken these existing elements plus some additions, Brain Food, Brain Box, Think Planet etc, and put it into a all encompassing 360° meetings concept.