BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER
The who rather than the where!

By Mike van der Vijver,
Co-founder of MindMeeting (Designers of successful international meetings)

There is a new trend in the world of Travel and Meetings: people increasingly appreciate true meetings with ‘ordinary’ counterparts - inhabitants of distant countries and cities who live often totally different lives from their own but with whom they can share something. The meeting and travel industry is not pro-active in responding to this new development, which is a pity. It would open up a whole new range of potential value-added services and, perhaps more importantly, it offers the travel and meeting industry the opportunity to do something useful: actually bring people from all over the world together.

Have you ever paid attention to what stories people tell you when they come back from their latest trip abroad or international conference? Very few will speak passionately about their hotel, the conference programme or the speakers. If they visited some really wild or exotic destination you may be shown a couple of mobile phone pictures of dangerously venomous snakes and spiders, a Bacardi sunset or this awesome Temple built by a people who (and nobody knows this!) already played a form of tennis several centuries b. C. However, a real sparkle in their eye will only appear when they tell you about the evening they spent in a small tavern with these locals they had never met before and who paid all - Yes, ALL their drinks; or the old couple who walked them to the railway station under a big umbrella because they had forgotten theirs in the hotel. People thrive on other people. It is when they truly meet other people that something happens inside.

I am convinced that people have a great need to meet other people, to share parts of their lives with each other. (Well, barring some eccentrics, the vast majority of us do.) It is also my feeling that the Travel and Meeting industry offers little contribution to really bringing people together. I'm not saying that it's not offering any contribution at all, I'm saying that it could do a lot more. I see two good reasons for doing more. One is that it makes sense businesswise, the other that there may even be a moral responsibility to do it. Let me say a little bit more about each argument.

It is my personal experience that the Travel and Meeting Industry is extremely risk averse. In the way most airports all over the world are similar, most trips, venues, sites, hotels, etc. are extremely similar. On the one hand this is safe and comforting, on the other it's boring, alienating and it's fake. It does not offer itself as a vehicle for offering people the opportunity to develop a real relationship with others. In the vast majority of circumstances, operators in the industry (planners, suppliers, hotel people, almost anyone, really) act a lot like Pavlov's dogs: some association has an annual conference visiting some major city. Suppose the Association of tax lawyers comes to Bussels. The immediate Pavlov salivation reaction is that they must have dinner at the Grand Place (excellent food and wine, of course!) and pay a tribute to Manneken Pis. And during the day they do their boring talking as taxes are notoriously a boring subject. But why not invite a Belgian Tax Consultant, who will explain how in his country he habitually strikes deals with the Inland Revenue Inspector on how much income tax his clients are to pay? During dinner, this distinguished professional can then sit for a quarter of an hour at each table and illustrate the technical snags. Wouldn't that be an interesting and unexpected meeting?

I'm just using this simple example to show that even extremely unassuming people can turn out extremely interesting, if properly ‘cast’ and if chosen on the basis of a more comprehensive idea of what meeting and communication in our industry is all about. Why do reception staff in big hotels always ask you what sites you would like to visit in their city, and never who you would be interested in meeting? They ask you Where but never Who? The implications of asking the latter question opens up an entire realm of novel value-added services (only one of which has been profitably exploited so far - but that is a private matter and in bad taste for the purposes of this article.). I, for one, would definitely prefer to have a dinner with a local family, rather than sit at my umpteenth gathering with folcloristic song and dance.

Opportunities for assisting people in meeting other people that may be interesting to them are everywhere around us: in the way interior environments are laid out, in guest profiles in databases that can be matched with local resources to offer a range of suggestions for an interesting evening out (Amazon does it for books, so what's the big deal?), etc., etc.

Surely, there are lots of practicalities to sort out, but the important thing is the change in attitude in the industry. In stead of offering stale fun, why not respond more creatively to this new trend we are signalling in the market, as a human response to the alienation of standardised sameness the world over? I feel it is high time the Meeting Industry starts doing what it purports to be doing but isn't: Make people meet and that doesn't mean go to some tourist resort and have little else to do than drink a little too much.

As for the second argument, of course the Travel and Meeting Industry will not dramatically change the world just by helping certain people to meet other people who are different (although I am convinced that people who share something, in particular a positive experience, are a lot less likely to dehumanise and accuse each other of being rogues and crusading neo-colonialists, respectively). Still, if in the course of its normal operations our industry can do something to help people overcome prejudices and strike up authentic relationships, all the better. I would definitely prefer to work in an industry that allows itself the leeway to do this rather than repeat endless variations on elevator music.

Information about the author:
Mike van der Vijver is a self-employed trainer and consultant who specializes in organizational improvement in connection with diversity-related issues. As the co-founder of MindMeeting, (Designers of successful international meetings), with his partner Eric de Groot, he applies his know-how and experience to processes, programming and HRM (Human Resources Management) in the meeting industry. He is a member of the 25-country ITIM network, a leading international group in intercultural management. Mike is a native of the Netherlands but lives most of his time in Naples, Italy, with his Italian wife and three daughters.