The number the planner remembers
A meeting planner walks into a hotel already braced to be charged more than the work is worth. That is not cynicism on their part, it is experience.
What they do about it is the part that costs you. The seasoned ones bring their own production company, which means outside crews, rigging approvals, dock windows, and a negotiation you have to staff. The rest pay the rate, and remember it.
Neither outcome helps your event survey scores or your rebooking rate. The way out is an AV rate that does not make bringing outside crews worth the trouble.
During my 5 years working alongside their team at the Sheraton Bellevue, I had the opportunity to collaborate with SSAV on multiple programs and client events. ... Their proactive communication, creative problem-solving, and calm, solutions-driven approach gave me complete confidence that my clients were in excellent hands.
Three ways to solve it
Install it and run it yourself. You own the equipment outright once the final invoice is paid, we handle design, procurement and commissioning, and your team operates it. This works where your event business is steady and you already have people who can run a room.
Install it and let us manage it. Same ownership, but we patch the systems on a defined cadence and support them, with AV faults routed into whatever ticketing system your team already works in. From our Plus tier up, we monitor them as well.
Let us run the AV department. We fund the equipment, we own it, we staff the building, and you earn a revenue split written into the contract. No capital, no depreciation, no refresh cycle to budget for, and no AV hiring problem.
Meeting space has to flip
A room that holds a general session at eight, three breakouts by eleven and an awards dinner at seven is not one room. It is three rooms that share a floor.
That is a design problem before it is an operations problem. Rooms that flip cleanly were specified to flip. Rooms that fight you every time were specified once, for one configuration, by somebody who was not thinking about Tuesday.
We design against what the space actually has to do across a week, and we standardize the control so your banquet team is not learning a different interface in every room.
The staffing math nobody wins
The hard part of in-house AV is not the equipment. It is knowing which roles to hire, how many of each, and how to shape a schedule so you are not carrying payroll through every slow week on the calendar.
Nobody has solved that formula perfectly, ourselves included. The usual industry answer is to charge enough to cover being wrong about it. That charge lands on your groups.
We have worked the other side of your contract
We started inside the building. Our first venue partnership was in 2002, and since 2007 we have also been the outside production company your planners bring with them, walking into buildings we did not run.
We know which house charges a planner is bracing for, because we have paid them. That is the experience we price from when we are the one running the room.
On record
We held an exclusive in-house agreement at one hotel from 2002 until it closed its doors in 2020.