Gaylord has staff sleepover to ensure meeting

In the midst of the largest storm in Washington, D.C., in 80 years, the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center hosted a corporate meeting for 367 managers Feb. 10. Preparation for the storm started a week in advance and included a change in the food and beverage delivery schedule and a staff slumber party.

The hotel’s leadership and department managers held two meetings a day one week prior to the event. John Jenkins, vice president and hotel manager at Gaylord National, offered housekeepers, catering staff and front-desk staff the chance to volunteer to stay onsite for three nights, and had 115 staffers take him up on it — the first time the hotel had ever done that. He also invited the landscaping crew, the cleaning crew and the marble-cleaning crew (the hotel has 75,000 square feet of marble) to stay over at the hotel to keep things running.

“What’s so great about this hotel is that it’s completely self-contained,” says Jenkins. “All the restaurants and retail shops were up and running during the storms, just humming along as the snow was coming down outside.”

In the end, the hotel waived all attrition and cancellation fees — which turned out to be unnecessary, and the client actually came in at 112 percent of the original room block because of all the early arrivals, and only lost 50 of the 367 attendees.

For more information on one of the Gaylord’s four properties visit GaylordHotels.com, which launched in February. The site provides information for meeting planners about resorts located in Nashville, Tenn., Kissimmee, Fla., National Harbor, Md., and Grapevine, Texas, as well as a suite of tools. The convention planners’ tool kit area features customizable attendance boosters, floor plan images and an instant quote request form for each property.