Katrina Blows Convention Show to Orlando
Travel Planners Transfers NBAA's 30,000-Hotel Room Nights from New Orleans to Orlando in Just Three
NEW YORK, NY, December, 2005. As the levees broke in New Orleans, the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) show organizers knew immediately that this year's mid-November event in the Big Easy was a washout. Nonetheless, instead of canceling the convention's massive 30,000 + hotel room night block, NBAA organizers made the dramatic decision to move the convention to Orlando, FL.
Travel Planners, the housing provider for the convention, kicked into high gear instantly. "We were in full disaster-avoidance mode in less than 24 hours," recounts President Ray Vastola. Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on August 29. On September 2, the decision to move was made. By September 9, room blocks and rates at 50 Orlando hotels were confirmed; contracts were signed within the next week.
A joint Travel Planners/IBM development team custom built software in SQL to match reservations to comparable hotel grades and room types in the two cities - a gargantuan job with about 8,500 reservations to move. Travel Planners' sophisticated data systems retained complete reservation histories so that assignments in Orlando were made in the same priority and sequence as the original reservations - some of which had been confirmed up to 10 months previously. Room matches complete, the entire data transfer process to the new hotels required no manual entry, and took only about one hour - a technological feat that came off without a hiccup.
Throughout the process, Travel Planners issued a series of update e-mails to all reservation holders, advising them when and how to expect information and confirmations. Despite the fact that the show also ran one week earlier, due to facilities availability, the final room count was virtually the same in Orlando as it had been in New Orleans.
"You haven't lived until you've compressed an 18-month housing process into three weeks," said Ray Vastola, President of Travel Planners, citing the company's post-Katrina response for client NBAA.
"The NBAA show redefined 'disaster management' for us," says Vastola. "We've always said we have the technology, experience and people skills to help our client organizations with any housing problem that could arise. We've proved to ourselves and one extremely supportive client that that was no over-promise."
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