I’ve just returned from a working trip to Las Vegas, and sometimes when I say that to people they look at me funny like, “Seriously?  What kind of work do you expect me to believe that you actually do in Las Vegas?”  And then I remember that not everyone understands the world of meeting planning which is basically about, well hello!, planning and managing meetings.  But I get that this is not your average job, and even though I’ve been doing it for some la-la-la number of years now I still never take it for granted that I’m fortunate to have chosen such an interesting career that gives me these opportunities to travel.

So for this post I’m going to share a few pictures snapped during the Las Vegas trip, and while none of them actually show me working (I was, I really was!), they were all taken during my time spent running in and around Caesar’s Palace, which is where the conference was being held.

For starters, I took this one of the long and confusing lines at hotel check-in, which is one aspect of what meeting planners try to manage for their guests.  In this case, well, see for yourself why we gave up trying to organize this chaos:

Eventually, all 350 of our guests somehow made it through this process and then managed to find their way back to our conference registration area to check in with us and get their schedules, name tags, etc.  By then, at least a dozen or so had already forgotten about that frustrating check in situation, but it’s safe to say that the other 338 people made sure to mention it to us.  Or was I imagining that?  No, I don’t think I was!   Oh the stories we hear. . .

Moving on. . .here is a scene inside one of the pods we rented for group use on the Las Vegas High Roller, which is their version of the large Ferris wheel attraction that circles high in the sky.  We had private use of enough of the pods to accommodate our group (not everyone was invited to this activity) and were actually able to place roll-in bars with full set-ups and bartenders in each pod so that our guests could actually, um, ‘get high’ while they were already soaring high above Las Vegas!

I did take lots more fun pictures on this trip but some I’ll save for later stories.  To end this post, I want to share a scene often encountered by myself and plenty of other planners when things start winding down at the end of most conference activities.  Keep in mind that normally the planners have been working non-stop since their arrival on the scene with very little sleep and a whole lot of physical activity, so many times this is what we end up looking like: