September Meeting Minutes

Date: 9/23/2010
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Stella Grill

Attendees:
Pedrozas (2.5)
Painters
Cherrys
Muellers
Hales
Burchett (Ken)

Meeting Overview:
Nice setting, good food, and good company - thanks Muellers for coordinating!

Meeting Recap:

2-day weekend at the retreat center
- Painters and Cherrys shared their experience
- There were, as expected, some minor hiccups, but overall the weekend went very well.
- Hiccups/observations included:

• retreat center wasn't completely setup for us
• coffee bar and registration tables weren't setup
• not all the beds and towels were ready
• arriving on Saturday morning early wasn't as difficult as originally thought
• confusion with our expectations that all the space would be ours
• general lack of communication with retreat center point of contact
• 2-day schedule put together by Pedrozas had mass @6:00... it's @5:00
• Sunday breakfast wasn't great - good but not necessarily worth $11
• with only 4 couples, there was plenty of space... there's some concern that it might be tight with 10 couples
• having Mike from Wriggles drop off the sandwich wraps on Sunday morning when he brought Sunday breakfast worked well. It allowed some flexibility in the schedule.
  

Both Cherrys and Painters were in favor of continuing to do weekends in the 2-day format at the retreat center

Hotel options
- The other issue we discussed was hotel options. As everyone is aware, La Quinta wanted to raise our rates by +20% and wanted ridiculous lock-in dates. As a community, it seems we want to maintain the option of the larger Spring/Summer weekends at a hotel (retreat center max is 10 couples).
- Pedrozas raised the possibility of doing an additional Spring/Summer weekend to accommodate the higher demand, but that idea didn't gain much traction. That idea has it's flaws as well.
- Main issue to address/resolve with any hotel is 2-day vs. 3-day options
- Crystal Inn in Midvale is a possibility

• Pedrozas went to see the space (some concern about limited sharing space)
• need to talk with hotel contact to discuss what our options are (early check-in & late checkout, renting large conference room instead of small one)
  

- Crystal suggested looking into hotel used by Marriage Encounter as an option
- Pedrozas received a large packet from Davis county with a ton of hotel options, but nothing is too promising

Other topics

• we're going to change our cancellation policy from 7 days to 17 days to help reduce last minute issues
• we talked about raising our cancellation fee (currently $60), but decided with the new cancellation policy, it wasn't necessary