The Calm Before the Storm

These past few weeks have been very quiet for me as the Housing Intern. As I had mentioned in a previous post, AANP's conference closed and has now been over for a couple weeks and it was the only conference making reservations through us. In fact, over the Independence Day holiday a majority of the GPCVB employees, including two of my supervisors, took off Thursday, Friday, and Tuesday (the holiday was observed on Monday).

I was also able to take off Friday and go on vacation over the weekend due to the slow couple of weeks. I went to Denver, Colorado to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousin. It was definitely a well needed trip! It was interesting though because my aunt and uncle were trying to convince me to apply for jobs in the Denver area. They also kept saying that Colorado has better tourism than Arizona, which I completely disagree with, even though both states are spectacular destinations. If anything, they are about even. They both specialize in outdoor adventures, they are both great places to hold conventions, and they both have numerous attractions to visit, including nightlife and culture. The one, obvious, difference is the weather; however, if a person visits Northern Arizona they will experience the same temperatures as they would in Colorado.


Anyway, back to my internship. My supervisors have been working hard to open six conferences so that we can resume making reservations for attendees. As of now, I believe that three are open and within the next several weeks or so the other three will be open as well if everything goes smoothly. Having six groups open at once will be insanity; so much so that my supervisors are already searching for, not one, but two interns for the fall semester. There is not much I can assist with in the set up process because it involves extensive training which is not made available to interns.

In the mean time, I was able to make a spread sheet for my supervisor that listed different sub blocks and room types needed for about 100 different people as well as how many room nights were needed for each individual person, for each sub block, and for the total of everyone. She needed me to do this so that she could make sure that she had the appropriate room nights available from the hotels. This is crucial because if we do not receive the correct amount of room nights from the hotel, then an attendee will end up without a hotel room and that is the last thing that should happen! Furthermore, I organized all of the collateral that has been collected from the GPCVB's members. This was a very fun and interesting task because this gave me the opportunity to learn about and see neat pictures of hotels/resorts, venues, convention and event services, and much more.

It should not be too long now before the insanity begins, but I am looking forward to it! For now, during the calmness, I will continue to clear off my supervisor's desk and organize her papers so that she has space for the incoming storm.