Rachel Wimberly

Forget the Show This Year?
August 1, 2007

Truly, I write not to whine. I am not the first writer nor is Tradeshow Week the first publication to state that this summer has seen a level of travel complaints that few thought could be reached.

I am about two-thirds of the way through a week-and-a-half-long trek that has led me from the Meeting Professionals Intl. conference in Montreal to TS2 in Washington, D.C., and now to the SISO Executive Conference in New York.

I have flown coach, stayed at the same hotels as all the other meeting attendees and overheard as many of their conversations as I could. Their tales have been full of connecting flights missed, lost luggage, rude taxi drivers, lamps in hotel rooms with burnt-out bulbs and bathrooms without towels, shampoo or soap.

Who could have imagined back in late 2001 or early 2002 that matters would one day reach this state?

Like many of you, I typically drag all my belongings on to the plane and do my best to smash them into overheard compartments. For reasons not interesting enough to explain, I checked a bag Monday for the trip from Montreal – with a connection in Philadelphia – to D.C. The first flight was two hours late but, mysteriously, the second was on time. I made it; the bag didn’t.

When it still hadn’t arrived at my hotel by noon the following day, I called U.S. Airways. “Nope,” was the answer, they had yet to track it down.

At 4 p.m., nearly 24 hours after arriving, I got the same answer.

On a hunch, I went to the airport myself. There was my suitcase, sitting in a pile with several hundred others, a few feet from where someone must have drug it off a carousel the night before and simply walked away. The reason the airline had not yet been able to track down my bag is because nobody had even tried.

I’ll survive. We all will. But at what point do all the people you’re trying to draw to your events, who perhaps only travel a few times a year, take heed of the complaints from their friends and families and decide to this year skip that tradeshow they always go to?

Posted by Rachel Wimberly on August 1, 2007 | Comments (0)