Ditch Those Dull Desks!

It's usually the same old scenario. You're at a meeting with your company at a typical hotel and conference center. You've been sitting in a meeting room listening to non-stop lectures from eight in the morning until your lecturer finally gets long-winded and dismisses the attendees at around five o'clock or so.

But when the meeting is over you know the work is not over, whether it's checking emails that you missed from being at your office or working on a presentation for the next day. But do you really want to go right upstairs to your room and sit at a cold desk and do work?

A new trend in hotels and conference centers is ditching those dulling hotel room desks. By adding ambience throughout the vicinity, hotel guests and meeting attendees alike can enjoy spending time in a cozy atmosphere outside of their hotel room.

Graylyn takes pride in treating its guests as members of the family - the Gray family, that is. As it was once the spacious home of Bowman Gray, the first president and CEO of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, and his wife Nathalie, Graylyn maintains its timeless and homey feeling guest rooms without the desks and internet hook ups! Although the guest rooms are quite beautiful and unique, the ambience around the estate is enough to keep you away to relax and efficiently do work.

Want to cozy up to the fire in the library while checking those never-ending emails? Graylyn also has WIFI throughout the estate, another perk for meeting attendees.

Comfort and efficiency are two very important roles in conducting meetings. It only makes since to keep those dull desks out of the guest rooms. What are your thoughts on this new trend?

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Tech Tuesday: QR Codes In The Meeting Industry

We've started seeing them everywhere. Listed at the bottom of a business card, under a signature on an email or even screen printed on a T-shirt, these QR codes are popping up everywhere and are taking futuristic steps from physical to virtual reality. But what exactly are these codes, and why are they so important for tech savvy people in the meeting industry?

QR codes, or Quick Response codes, are two-dimensional bar codes that contain all sorts of information that can be read by a bar code reader, or more importantly, a smartphone. In the age of fast paced and ever-changing technology, it is the job of a meeting planner to stay up-to-date on the trends. And while QR codes just recently became a staple for businesses in the past few years, meeting planners have a great advantage in utilizing these codes to benefit their company.

As common knowledge goes, no one can go anywhere without their phone these days, which is what makes QR codes ideal. The ability of taking your smartphone phone out of your pocket and scanning one of these codes is what makes this new technology so practical.

Small and compact, QR codes can pack a lot of information allowing creative planners to use them in as many ways as they can think of. Since they can be printed onto virtually anything, takeaways at trade shows are being seen with these little black and white bar codes all over them - mugs, canvas bags, the booths themselves, etc.

So how do you get started on creating QR codes for your company? Well it's quite simple, actually. There are many free websites that will convert a URL, video, or just plain old text to a fancy, technology forward QR code.

An example site that will generate QR codes is qrcode.kaywa.com. This website actually has a QR code reader app that you can download from your smartphone, making it a one-stop-shop for getting into the QR code frenzy.

But, as stated earlier, the field of technology is highly fast paced and ever-changing. So for today we have QR codes, but we never know what new and improved innovation might come out tomorrow. Meeting planners, it is your job to stay on top of current technology. It will benefit you and your company in the long run!

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