Deregulation

I was pleased to be able to attend Amadeus’s Total Rail Passenger Forum in November. It was an excellent event with some good speakers and useful delegates – informative and good for networking even though it was hard work!

The thing which really struck me, though, was the excellence of the organisation. I say this as someone who has both organised and spoken at similar events – and my experience has been mixed of late.

At one recent conference, the scheduled start time was 9:00. My train was a bit late so I really rushed from the underground train to the registration desk – only to find that the event had been retimed to start at 9:45! And the end had been changed from 17:00 to 16:20. OK, it was partly my fault – I did get an email the day before confirming a 9:00 start and with an agenda which I didn’t look at as page 2.

However, that tells me that at least three of their speakers had pulled out – and that they didn’t have a Plan B. At some – most – of my conferences, I have had delegates come up to me and say that they happened to have a presentation they could show if I had a spare slot. I have also been contacted by conference organisers a very few weeks ahead of an event and asked to speak. OK, I then knew that I wasn’t their first choice as a speaker, but I would usually do it if I could manage the date. These organisers didn’t have the foresight to deal with speakers dropping out – why?

At another conference, the organisers had put together a number of panels –thinking that a panel discussion or two would break up the round of non-stop PowerPoint presentations. However, they had obviously not communicated their intentions to some of the participants. One in particular had come in with a full presentation. As the chairman (and only other member of that particular panel) started to discuss issues with her, she asked the IT technician for her PowerPoint file to be displayed, gave her presentation, and then was visibly disconcerted to find that she was expected to discuss the topic with the chairman rather than have a standard question and answer session.

I'd be interested to know of any other events out there that people have been to that they could recommend around travel and the passenger, in the field of Air-Rail or Rail would be my preference.  

 

So well done the Amadeus team, who had planned and organised so effectively!

I hope you enjoyed reading this: I look forward to your feedback.

Andrew