A Meeting Of The Minds (And Bodies)

Hilton is reinvigorating the agenda for business meetings with creative, healthy, mood-boosting activities—not to mention puppies.

It’s not easy being a meeting planner these days. Along with the endless details involved in booking rooms, selecting a menu, and making sure the video equipment works on cue, you face the larger challenges of ensuring that attendees are (and remain) engaged, focused, and productive. The bottom line: You’ve got to wow them.

Hilton’s popular Meet with Purpose program grew out of this insight and is now in almost 300 hotels. Based on three core principles—mindful meeting, mindful eating, and mindful being—it gives planners a creative and flexible offering designed to resonate with attendees on an individual, even emotional level. The goal is making attendees feel something, through a combination of healthy food, energizing exercises, social impact activities, and puppies. Yes, actual puppies. But more on that later.

To understand how the program works, we spoke to Frank Passanante, Hilton senior vice president of group sales and industry relations, and to its vice president of culinary Americas, Marc Ehrler (aka Chef Marc), who also happens to be a French master chef.

FastCo.Works: How did you know there was a need for Meet with Purpose?

Frank Passanante: Our customers—the meeting planners—were expressing an incredible thirst for more customized and creative offerings. They’re feeling challenged to plan not just meetings, but memorable and surprising experiences. Then we looked at the research. We learned that four out of 10 people get drowsy or doze off during meetings, and three out of four report feeling lethargic and less productive after heavy lunches. More than half are not satisfied with their ability to stick with healthy eating habits. So the events are taking a personal toll.