We’re all in Casablanca now, trapped in travel purgatory and desperately seeking our letters of transit
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“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, we have to be stuck in this one.”
That silent scream is the unofficial mantra of the modern meeting attendee, staring into the flickering departures screen as if it holds the secrets to the universe. As planners you spend months—years, even—calibrating every conceivable attendee touchpoint. You agonize over the thread count of the hotel sheets, the lumens of the keynote projector, and the precise moment to serve the coffee. You design experiences. You build worlds.
And then you surrender your attendees to the airport.
You throw them, with a cheerful “see you at registration!”, into a system that has all the charm and predictability of a high-stakes casino run by a bored anarchist. In the intricate choreography of modern air travel, the flight delay has become an all-too-common feature. It is the unscheduled intermission, the frustrating pause in a journey that demands precision. For the frequent meeting attendee, these disruptions are not a matter of if, but when. Airports such as Denver International (DEN), Newark Liberty International (EWR), and San Francisco International (SFO) consistently report flight delay frequencies hovering around 30% or more, a testament to the operational complexities of managing immense passenger volumes, intricate hub-and-spoke networks, and the unpredictable whims of weather.
Your attendees aren’t just waiting for a flight; they are refugees in a holding pattern, desperately seeking their “letters of transit,” just like all those characters in the classic film, Casablanca. That elusive boarding pass, that “On Time” status, that final gate announcement—these are the modern documents that grant them passage to your meticulously planned event, or mercifully, back home to their families.
But today’s Major Strasser isn’t a single, sneering villain you can outwit with a rigged roulette wheel at the back of the bar. The forces grounding your attendees are far more chaotic, anonymous, and implacable.
They are the government shutdowns that leave overworked air traffic controllers staring at screens for forty-eight hours straight, without a paycheck. They are the massive, system-wide AWS outages that can vaporize an airline’s entire logistical backbone in the blink of an eye. They are the mundane, soul-crushing “technical glitches” and “unforeseen crew shortages” that have turned the simple act of air travel into a gamble, a test of will, a Kafkaesque joke.
We are all extras from central casting in Casablanca now, searching for a modern-day Rick’s Café Americain to wait out the madness. This new reality, this immutable fact of our professional lives, leads to a radical question: What if the site selection process started not with the convention center, but with the airport?
Since it appears these plagues upon the “House of Travel” are systemic, permanent, and entirely beyond our control, I shall now therefore humbly propose a new course of action. It is a proposal that may at first seem ludicrous, even cynical, but upon quiet reflection is, I believe, a perfectly rational and humane response to an irrational world.
My proposal is this: that meeting professionals begin choosing host destinations based not on the quality of the ballrooms and the off-site event venues, but on the relative comfort and civility of the airport in which the attendees will inevitably be stranded.
This is not absurdity; it is a pragmatic reordering of priorities.
Planners must accept that flight cancellations and six-hour delays are a built-in feature of the journey. Given this, is it not your solemn duty as planners—your core responsibility as architects of the attendee experience—to ensure that this inevitable purgatory has premium-plus seating, free-flowing power outlets, and demonstrably reliable Wi-Fi?
Is it truly sane to spend three days debating the merits of a plated meal versus a buffet, yet leave the single most agonizing, unpredictable, and rage-inducing part of the attendee’s journey to cruel fate?
To aid you in this new and essential strategic imperative, our feature story this week gives planners a detailed, no-nonsense breakdown of the best domestic airports for the marooned traveler. We’ve researched the criteria that actually matter in those lost hours: the quality of the gin joints, the cleanliness of the bathrooms, the proximity of decent food to the most-delayed gates, and the availability of those quiet, forgotten corners perfect for a stress-induced nap.
FURTHER READING: America’s Best Airports to Be Stranded In
Rick and Ilsa, of course, will always have Paris.
But our story might just convince you that your attendees—and your sanity—will always have Detroit, or Denver, or, dare I say it? Newark. In this strange new world, it could be the beginning of a beautiful—and profoundly logical—friendship.
Any thoughts, opinions, or news? Please share them with me at vince@meetingsevents.com.
Photo created by Gemini
