2005 Winter Marketing Educators’
Conference Evaluation Results
Response History: 2005 2004 2003 2002
Attendees: 436 415 403 378 # of Responses 105 129 117 54
Response Rate: 25% 31% 30% 14%
Survey Launch Date: Friday, February 11, 2005
Email Intro: Dear Attendee: We hope you enjoyed the 2005 Winter Marketing Educators' Conference! We truly value any feedback you can provide of your conference experience. Please take a few brief moments to complete this evaluation.
Email Trailer: We look forward to seeing you at next year's conference to be held February 17-20, 2006 at the Tradewinds Island Grand Resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida. If you are interested in submitting a paper, please refer to the official call for papers in your conference registration packet. You can also find it online by visiting the AMA website: http//: www.marketingpower.com/winteredcfp .
Conference Location: Westin LaCantera—San Antonio, Texas
Event Dates: February 11-14, 2005
Survey Code: WinterEd05
Plenary Session: NONE
Council Initiatives Making the Transition: New Marketing Faculty Workshop
(Friday pre-conference session sponsored by Texas Schools)
1.2- Marketing Ethics: Content, Structure and Delivery
6.1- Are Marketing Academics Looking Too Closely at the Trees and Missing the Forest?
Big Special Sessions: 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1
Hotel Room Block: MET/OVERSOLD 946 rooms filled of 940 contracted
Exhibits: OVERSOLD 11 tabletops
American Marketing Association
2005 Winter Marketing Educator’s Conference
OVERALL CONFERENCE EVALUATION:
1) Please rate the conference as a whole: 4.09
2) How satisfied were you with the following aspects of the event?
Pre-Conference Registration/ / 4.58On-Site Registration / 4.13
Hotel Registration / 4.11
Hotel Service / 3.81
Conference Facilities / 3.58
Quality of Presentations / 4.29
Exhibits / 3.66
Catered Events / 3.62
AMA Staff / 4.28
AMA Travel Service Group (Tower Travel)
98% did not utilize Tower Travel / 3.01
Awards Luncheon / 4.04
3) Please provide any specific comments you have regarding any of the previously mentioned aspects of the event or the papers presented. (Please reference the specific aspect in your comments):
§ This was the best AMA conference I have ever attended. Only two criticisms: First, the hotel was in the middle of no where. Second, the AV guys were inept at best.
§ The location of the hotel was unacceptable for a city like San Antonio. We were a $40 cab ride each way from the River Walk. There were only 2 hotel restaurants for dinner and they were incapable of handling the demand. Plus, it gives us little choice. Very poor site location for the hotel!!! Extremely disappointing!
§ Hotel was very expensive and we didn't even utilize the "spa and resort" services for the extra $10/day charge.
§ I was very disappointed in the conference because I misunderstood what it was about. I thought it was an educator’s conference I would get ideas I could take back to the classroom. As a faculty member at a community college, I need things I can take back to class and serve my small business constituents today. I was hoping to get some hands-on ideas I could implement in my training with industry. There was too much theory for what I do. As one person from industry who attended seminars once said, “I like the idea that every 10 minutes I get something from you I can plug into my business tomorrow.” That was not what I found at this conference. While the topics were interesting, it was a waste of my time and money. But I now understand I am not the targeted customer for this conference or possibly the AMA. Jim Kress (541) 383-7712
§ Poor location. Should be at a less expensive location that is within walking distance of other restaurants. Should also be discounts for people not there for whole conference. I arrived late Saturday night but had to pay for events, luncheons I could not attend. Make it 3 days long, not 4. There was almost no-one there on the 4th day.
§ Do NOT hold meetings at such a remote location. Many faculty and doctoral students who could not stay at Westin put up with taxi fares, car rentals, and driving hassles. Closest alternative hotel was more than 2 miles away. Why bring people to San Antonio, and meet at a resort an hour away from downtown?
§ There is the NEED for AMA to reconsider the hard copy version of the Proceedings. It is very hard to sit in a presentation without it. I would not mind paying a little extra for the hard copy type. A few colleagues were with this opinion too.
§ I think we can do better than a $200 per night resort. Our meetings run all day so who has time for tennis or golf? It adds a hefty cab ride to the expense report and requires dining at the hotel restaurants, or it requires a rental car in the mix.
§ I think the AMA is charging us more and more money for conferences and providing us less and less. In $275 only one lunch is provided. You can easily include another packed lunch. At the sessions, only water is provided. No coffee, light snacks etc. I also had a problem with facilities. I was chairing a session and laptops are not provided by AMA. I mean you can’t even give facilities that are central to the core of the meetings? When I complained, I was told that it is too expensive $400 and AMA is very bottom line oriented. That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard. Are you in the business of making money or providing some service? I got the sense that AMA is doing us a favor by putting this together. Additionally a lot of my colleagues from state schools were complaining about the expense of hotels. Why don’t you guys have two hotels that you negotiate with - some at the $200 per night that some academics can afford, and some at about $100. I think it is atrocious that nobody seems sensitive to the cost of hotels. In addition, the hotels are always far away from everywhere – why? Other associations have sessions in downtown hotels that are amenable to other activities. So I am extremely dissatisfied with the AMA conferences from their management perspective. I don’t know if you will pay attention to my thoughts - but if you want to discuss further - call me Prof. Manoj Agarwal, Binghamton University 607-777-6860
§ This conference has really come along due to the repositioning back to thought leadership. Also, Cher and Andrea deserve kudos for their responsiveness to issues as they came up.
§ The conference venue made it nearly impossible to go downtown. For people coming all the way from Europe this was really sad. The AMA really should consider offering some "social" and touristy events for people that are not only interested in the content of the conference. As it is, the venue of any conference does not matter at all - which I think is not good. As it is, the only interest catered for besides professional ones is golfing. The hotel did not offer shuttle services which is the least I would have expected. Furthermore, the hotel staff was not aware of the special rate (or what it included), e.g. newspaper, mini bar etc. The reception on the first evening should last longer or start later to accommodate people arriving from non-US locations. As it is, you always miss the first occasion to meet people as it is nearly impossible to arrive before 7 p.m. from places in Europe, for instance. Including the fire alarm and non-working overheads etc., there were a couple of instances when presentations were made impossible due to insufficient technical support. Furthermore, I was really mad because the AMA and/or Westin hotel did not supply laptops. I was coming all the way from Europe and carried my laptop around because no one else in my session had one. That is annoying. As for the sessions: The panel sessions on specific fields of interest are a good idea, but you should make the "gurus" in the field present there latest findings, not make general statements everybody can re-add and has read in their books anyway. I am especially referring to a session on customer valuation which did not offer any new insights. I got the impression that presenters were reluctant to talk about the really pressing or innovative aspects as they wait for their path breaking publications to appear first. That's not good. That is not the reason why people come in and listen.
§ The location was very isolated making dining difficult
§ The hotel was beautiful, but so far removed from the San Antonio experience. I would have preferred something in the city.
§ Terrible hotel selection because of poor location in the San Antonio area and expensive access to downtown. I will not attend conferences in such locations in the future.
§ The hotel was great but too expensive. My school probably won't reimburse the total amount.
§ Why go to a resort hotel at a high price when there is no time to use facilities? The hotel was a rip off with $10 a day for the spa added on to the room and $5 to connect to the Internet. Speakers were mixed. Some papers were not of the caliber I expected. Speakers should be required to provide copies of their slides; some were hard to follow especially if English was not their first language.
§ I am on the practitioner side and this was an excellent venue for me personally. I think it would be mutually beneficial if more practitioners were involved in the future. It would certainly be a challenging, add intensity, and create a balance that would be enriching for both sides.
§ No technical support by the hotel when technical problem (power) occurred. The hotel was too distant from town centre
§ Excellent sessions with noted scholars
§ The registration, organization, etc. were all fine. I thought the hotel was a little too removed from the city. Some sessions were very good, but some talks had research that wasn't very far along (e.g., "this is the experiment I plan to run), which was disappointing.
§ The conference itself was great. However, the hotel was disappointing. Little service was available due to it being the off-season. The cost of getting to the hotel from the airport was exorbitant ($80 roundtrip!). There were no amenities or dining options nearby, thus, "trapping" us with costly and limited hotel restaurant food. I will not attend another meeting if it is located in the middle of nowhere.
§ I share the widespread view that the hotel was expensive for what conference participants wanted and that it was too far out from the city.
§ Conference facilities at the Westin La Cantera was lovely however, it was very expensive to stay there. Food and beverages, particularly if ordered through room service, were astronomical. Because the hotel was not in the city, it was expensive to take taxis off-site. A $45 cab ride into San Antonio is outrageous. Most attendees I spoke with would have preferred being in San Antonio instead of so far away from the city. #5 Hotel Service - I ordered tea during the Awards Luncheon but it never came. It seems that all the waiters/waitresses were told to exit the room once the award presentations began. I understand the need for quiet but once the wait staff left, you couldn't get or request anything from them.
§ I do not enjoy having the conference at a resort that is so far from downtown. I felt like I was on an island and the lack of choice and high price for the resort services detracted greatly from the conference.
§ Now that we publish a lot of abstracts in proceedings, it would be nice to produce a CD of full papers, even as a "working paper" CD so we can see the work.
§ The papers were excellent. The hotel chosen was too expensive, and too far from the city. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go around the hotel, this was very disappointing. I also felt that the conference was not a good value for the money. At most conferences they provided lunches for all days you are there and one conference dinner. For this conference, even though it was just as expensive, or more so than others, there was just one lunch provided. Also, the hotel was expensive enough to provide breakfast included with the rooms but they did not. This should have been negotiated with the conference package - this, along with the substantial taxes charged on top of the room rates, really pushed up the cost of the conference and made it quite exorbitant.
§ The hotel and staff were good, but I was very dissatisfied to be in San Antonio and stuck out at a golf resort. It was extremely too far from the River Walk, and the restaurant/food options at the hotel were extraordinarily limited and the food quality was sub-par.
§ It would be nice if we had colored tabs on our badges so we could identify similar interests (CB, strategy, international, etc.)
§ The hotel was nice but it was unfortunate that we were so far away from downtown San Antonio.
§ The plenary session in Scottsdale was useful. This was not done in San Antonio. The hotel was too far (in cab $) from downtown. Hotel restaurants not always available, too expensive. San Antonio is charming and festive, but it was inaccessible.