Meeting Puerto Rico online

When the new meetpuertorico.com site debuts Aug. 11, there will be the usual fanfare of press releases and announcements to accompany the launch. But what the casual observer won’t see behind the sleek, information-rich Web site that took nearly half a year to develop are the changing attitudes about online marketing that drove the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau to the redesign its Internet presence in the first place.

“We feel the Internet is changing the way we do business,” says Felix Laboy executive vice president of the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau, a nonprofit corporation responsible for bringing meetings to the island. “We are considering this to be another sales office. We’re putting resources into this site as if it were one of our other sales offices.”

What that means is a design budget of $90,000 to hire New York Web consultants K2 Design, which also handles such big-name clients as Arthur Andersen, Intel and Standard & Poor’s. It means thousands of hours spent building and scripting a database of properties and suppliers in Puerto Rico. It also translates into a great deal of thinking and planning in an effort to make sure the new meetpuertorico.com doesn’t become just another hypertext brochure.

“We think of our Web site is a living, breathing, changing thing,” adds Laboy.

Anthropomorphizing the Internet is nothing new. As far back as 1995, when the interactive travel industry was still a toddler, visionaries were thinking of Web sites in human terms. There was talk of the “organic” nature of the Internet among many futurists who early on recognized the ever-evolving ways of cyberspace.

But in the meeting industry, that kind of analogy is relatively novel. Despite the emergence of online projects such as PlanSoft, I left the last Meeting Professionals International convention with the impression that a majority of events are still planned the old-fashioned way — by phone or through faxed or mailed requests for proposals.

Taking the analogy a step further by thinking of a Web site as another sales office (and pouring the equivalent resources into it) is all but unheard of. Perhaps the last place that anyone would expect innovation on this scale is at the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau, which is charged with promoting the $64 million-a-year meeting business on the island.

Conventions aren’t sold on-line the same way vacations are. The process of responding to an RFP can take weeks or months, and once a decision is made on a meeting, it’s not something a reservationist can help tie up in couple of minutes. Plus, Puerto Rico isn’t exactly known for its forward-thinking tourism initiatives online.

So what made the PRCB do it? Part of the reason has nothing to do with the Web, according to Laboy. Puerto Rico is building a world-class convention center in San Juan that’s being touted as a “bridge between North and South America.” It’s expected to be finished by 2002, and bureau authorities wanted a world-class Web site to promote the project.

The other reason, says Laboy, is that the old meetpuertorico.com site had outlived its usefulness. “It wasn’t as user-friendly and interactive as we wanted it to be. In the travel business, you have to have a cutting-edge Web site, and that’s what we wanted,” he says.

The new meetpuertorico.com fixes that problem. There are sections offering information on how to plan a meeting in Puerto Rico, general destination material that will appeal to more than just meeting planners, and a helpful site map that quickly takes users where they want to go.

One of the most promising aspects of the new site is a trademarked “Meeting Wizard” that helps you search for an appropriate venue, property or supplier. “You can tell the Wizard that you need 500 rooms and it will ask you a series of questions. Then it will tell you which properties are able to handle the meeting,” says Laboy.

Eventually, the PRCB would like to offer a way to view actual hotel inventory, but for now it is content to list the hotels and convention centers and offer an automated way of delivering an RFP to those clients. The redesigned meetpuertorico.com is also more colorful and intuitive than its predecessor. What’s more, it allows users to toggle between English and Spanish from any page — no more hitting the “back” button a dozen times to switch languages.

But Laboy is hard-pressed to explain the quantum leap from virtual brochure to virtual sales office. It was, he implies, the right thing to do at the time. The PRCB wasn’t trying to re-invent the metaphorical wheel when they set out to change the site, but in re-launching meetpuertorico.com, they may have rolled way ahead of their competitors.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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