I. The Country That Asked Me What I Thought
In May a tourism board flew me to Slovenia for eight days and asked me what I thought of their venues.
I had been doing the job for about three or four months. My parents have run an incentive travel company in Argentina for twenty-eight years, and this August I became a director of it, which is to say that in May I had no business being there, asking questions I could barely form, in rooms I did not know how to read.
I have the video of it now. Nine minutes, filmed on the ground, and the part I want to write down here is the part that took me six of those eight days to hear.
II. What They Show You First
Every property opens the same way. Someone meets you in the lobby, walks you through a set of doors, and there is the room.
The room is always beautiful. I want to be precise about this, because it sounds like a complaint and it is not: it is genuinely hard to find a bad room. The ceilings are high, the light is good, the chairs are new, and somebody has been getting that room ready since before you landed.
So I wrote down the marble, and the ceiling height, and the natural light, and the number of chairs, and the whole time I felt like I was doing the job.
III. Nobody Photographs the Walk
What I should have written down was how far that room sat from the lobby.
That is the walk two hundred people make four times a day. Nobody photographs it. It is not on the floor plan the hotel sends you, it does not appear in the site inspection deck, and there is no line for it in the budget. It is also, on the wrong property, the thing your group will remember, in the way you remember a blister.
I only understood this because of a bus. Bled, a sunny Sunday in May, before the season had properly started, and the transport was chaotic enough to show me what August would look like. I got sweaty on a bus in Slovenia, and somewhere on that ride the actual shape of the work arrived.
The trip lives in the twenty minutes before the room and the twenty minutes after, and nobody photographs those. My parents have known that for twenty-eight years. They never put it in a sentence, because for them it is just how you talk.
IV. The Four Questions I Kept
So now I ask four questions, and I ask the same four every time I do this.
One. Can it actually hold the group? Not the brochure capacity: the capacity when the room is set for dinner instead of theatre. The number decides everything downstream, how many buses, how many rooms, whether the gala happens in one room or two, whether there is a gala at all.
Two. How hard is it to get there? Not in kilometres. In the seven in the morning departure with four buses and a flight to hold.
Three. What would go wrong? Every destination has one, and the honest ones tell you before you have to find out on a Sunday in high season.
Four. Would I put my own name on it? Which is a different question from whether it is nice, and the one where I have to actually mean it.
Underneath all four is the same question, which is what I could not have written down in May: you are not buying them a hotel. You are buying them their first week in two years where the thing they are worried about stops being the most important thing in the world.
V. What Slovenia Answered Back
I ran the four on the country, and the answers are in the video with the footage behind them. Short version.
It holds a group. It is a small country and I expected to find rooms too thin, and the smallest hotel I inspected had thirty-five, which is not small unless you are running a congress.
It is closer than it looks from Buenos Aires. I flew in from Frankfurt in about an hour. There was a summer when Game of Thrones made Dubrovnik feel local to Argentines and nobody called Croatia far anymore, and Slovenia is that same distance.
What would go wrong is the bus, so I would not rely on public transport there, which means booking the transfer or taking the taxi or getting the car, and building that into the number before anyone signs.
And I would put my name on it, which is why it is now on the list when a brief crosses my desk and the country fits.
VI. Run the Four on Your Own Destination
If you have a trip in front of you, the four questions work without me.
Get the capacity in the setup you will actually use, and get it in writing.
Walk the distance from the furthest room to the general session, and time it. Then multiply by four, per person, per day.
Ask the property what goes wrong in your month. If nothing goes wrong in their answer, you are talking to sales, not to operations.
Ask yourself whether you would sign your name under this itinerary if it went sideways. Somebody stands in a room and promises it will all just work, and then carries it when it does not.
VII. Where the Rest of It Is
The full nine minutes are here, with the rooms and the roads and the bus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvqdCOAG54o
And the region by region notes, what I would actually book in each of the seven and what I would skip, go out by email:
Get the Slovenia notes, region by region
One more thing, and I say it in the video too. That trip was paid for by the people who wanted me to see their country. You should know that. It did not change what I saw, and it did change how many doors opened, because I was treated like a king and I know that is not what a normal visit to Slovenia looks like.
I don’t know if the next one looks anything like this one, and nothing on the scale of the Slovenia inspection is in my calendar right now, so I am not going to promise you a date, only that this keeps happening.
Welcome back to my universe.
Ivan
A new episode every Friday, and this letter is the written version.