| Unique Venue
Down on the Farm
After generations of Americans have spent their lives in cities, with supermarkets and restaurants as their only sources of food, farms and farming carry an air of mystery and intrigue as well. Capitalizing on Americans’ growing interest in agriculture, a number of working farms have begun opening to the public. Not just for school field trips or to sell Christmas trees in December and pumpkins at Halloween, some farms have established meeting space and designed programs for adults as well, offering unique, back-to-nature venues for meetings and events. More>>
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The state of the meetings industry in early 2009 is…unsettled. For many, this year (and 2010 as well) will be a time of smaller budgets, fewer meetings, greater accountability and general cutbacks. But on the plus side (if a silver lining is to be found in all of this), planners will likely see lower room rates, better bargaining power and fewer nights on the road. That’s the general consensus among more than 2,700 planners who participated in MPI’s annual FutureWatch survey, as well as respondents to a SMERF Meetings Journal readership survey conducted last month.
