2 Tips for Picking the Best Hotel Room at a Conference
When you’re traveling, be smart about how you choose your hotel room.
When I travel on business, I like to get hotel rooms with beautiful views, but that’s only one thing to consider when booking a room. If I’m attending a conference, for example, I know I’m going to be traveling back and forth to my room all day long. The back and forth, itself, can eat up a lot of time, so I’m especially careful about choosing where I stay.
First of all, I always book a room in the conference hotel. Yes, it may be more expensive, but it means I can spend more time in and around other attendees. For networking purposes, proximity can be invaluable! It also means better blood sugar regulation. The first day, I go out and grab some power bars, nuts, and appropriate drinks, and keep them in my room. When we’re on break, it’s a simple matter to run up to the room and recharge my metabolism for the next round of sessions.
But then, there’s my sneaky trick that makes this even easier and quicker. Ask the front desk which floor the elevators stop at when they’re between passengers. If they know, book a room on those floors. In a recent conference I attended, it was the 15th floor, and that’s where I stayed. When it was time to go from my room back to the conference, there was almost never a wait for the elevator. Had I stayed on the “executive” level, it would have been a much longer wait for an elevator to go all the way to floor 21, because that’s not where the elevators were programmed to stop.
You wouldn’t think that this makes a huge difference, but it does. Next time you’re at a conference, get a room that makes it easy and fast to get to and from the conference, and you can greatly increase your flexibility while still getting the most out of the conference itself.
Beautiful young businesswoman image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
