[This article originally appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of BizBash magazine.]
Three event planners share stories of what happened when V.I.P.s posed a problem
An Expensive No-Show
At the opening of Los Angeles’ California Science Center in 1998, a board member arranged for a high-profile, Grammy award-winning singer to perform for free. The singer’s face went out on every invitation, and the event drew 1,200 guests, many of them V.I.P.s in their own right. Christina Sion, vice president of food and event services at the California Science Center, and her staff filled the singer’s requests for a V.I.P. trailer and other amenities, which totaled $40,000. But on the night of the event, Sion was outside on her cell phone for an hour with the singer’s staff, who told her he was 10 minutes away—repeatedly, every 10 minutes. “We were trying to gauge the night’s program as to when he was performing, and finally I just made the decision that he was not coming and we should move on,” Sion says. They were never reimbursed for the cost of the amenity-filled trailer.
A Diva on a Roll
In the end, planners do whatever it takes to make important guests happy. Danielle Jennings, former global head of event marketing at Merrill Lynch and now a vice president at Micro Target Media, remembers one V.I.P. who got very upset when the hotel didn’t put the toilet paper roll on the “right” way. “She would freak out and call us, and we would have to call housekeeping to go to her room and make it right,” Jennings says. “Once you live in that world, you don’t think requests are crazy anymore. You just shrug your shoulders and say, ‘That’s my job.’”
Something in the Water
For one planner, the V.I.P.’s wife was the biggest troublemaker. Before a dinner, the wife said she had water allergies, and had to have special water flown in from a particular place, not only for her to drink but to be used to cook her food. “The day of the dinner, the water didn’t arrive in time, so I had to send someone out to get all the purified water they could find. We got a recommendation from the chef as to which water would be best,” the planner says. “Her food was served a little later that everyone else’s, but it worked out.”
