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Monday, October 25, 2004

How to Vacation

The next time you go on vacation, here’s what you need to do to maximize your experience (and get free stuff):

A week before you leave, call the convention and visitors bureau (CVB) in whatever city you’re traveling to. Tell them you’re planning a special event in that city and you’re looking for a venue, and it will include a lot of food and you want it to be fun and high-energy. And you have a budget of $100,000. Give or take $10k.

Why? You’ll be chauffeured, pampered, wined, dined and entertained.

That’s what we did today. (Except we actually are planning an event for a client.) My co-workers Chris, Joy and I were driven from the Orlando Peabody hotel (Don’t believe what they say about the duck “palace.” As Chris said, “it’s a duck prison with Italian marble.”) to House of Blues, where we given a tour of the facility, which is awesome, and then fed a variety of foods to sample the menu. We ate cornbread, shrimp, cod, jambalaya, Caesar salad, chicken with pasta, mashed potatoes, vegetables (I ate them, Mom, don’t worry), bread pudding and key lime pie. Then we took some cornbread mix home to make it later.

From the House of Blues, we toured a couple of swanky Orlando bars and the Pac-Man arcade, where we ate more food and were given free passes, including an open bar. Believe me, I’ll be utilizing that later this week. After those bars, we headed to Hard Rock and were treated to the back stage tour – basically a rock ‘n’ roll-lover’s dream.

Post-Hard Rock, we were finished with our tour and took off to a restaurant to eat and drink more.

I’m so full I can barely breathe.

Sadly, it’s not all fun and games. From here on out through the week, it gets progressively worse. Tomorrow we have a seminar, and then we’re throwing a party at Disney for our client. Wednesday and Thursday is when it gets rough. I have to coordinate and manage 16 hour-long interviews with editors, making sure the editors get where they’re supposed to, the client stays on message and is in the right place when we need them. It’s going to be a long two days, and my feet are going to be sore. Someone will have to give me a massage when I return, and some Band-Aids for blisters.

But not any food. I won’t need to eat for another week.

Posted by Aaron on October 25, 2004 10:44 PM