Meeting Planner Careers

Tarmac delays do not happen often, in fact, only .05 % of the time are passengers ever forced to remain on a plane waiting for the aircraft to take off. The infrequency of occurrence is little comfort when you are the one forced to spend hours listening to unhappy passengers and infants wailing in distress. The plane’s captain has ultimate control over passenger mobility and if he says no one leaves the plane, then no one does.

There has been a move in the last several years to push laws through Congress that prevent airlines from forcing passengers to remain on the tarmac for more than 3 hours at a time. This allows time for ground crews gather and help passengers disembark into the airport when inevitable delays occur.

On August 7, ExpressJet forced passengers to remain onboard overnight. Instead of allowing passengers to debark and spend the night more comfortably in the Rochester, Minnesota airport, the company held the 47 passengers on board. Public outcry notwithstanding, ExpressJet and the DOT insist that their actions were appropriate and necessary.

Are government regulations the answer to the problem of tarmac delays? The airline industry protests that no other industry has been targeted in quite the same way for regulation. It is difficult to imagine any other industry treating their customers with quite the same amount of disregard and disdain.

Crises are always followed by change. It’s not only necessary, it’s inevitable–humans want to fix things that are broken. However, when the crisis is on a global scale, the change has to be in proportion. For the modern meeting planner, this means that other people may try to steer your business until you have little to say.

Whether of not they succeed is up to you. For instance, the recent government regulations on meetings may have caused the demise of small meeting planner businesses. Those business owners may have simply felt like they were not only swimming upstream, but up some giant waterfall. Read more…