Chilly rooms anger people at conferences, social events

— -- Elizabeth Wickman doesn't smoke, but she spent most of her Hawaiian-themed high school reunion huddled outside with the smokers. At least she was warm. Inside, her classmates, all attired in luau wear, were freezing because the hall they had rented in Alton, Ill., was so nippy.

"A lot of people left early, which was such a bummer because you hadn't seen these people in 10 years," she says. No matter how often they were asked, the maintenance staff couldn't or wouldn't get the temperature above 60 degrees.

"I live in Nebraska, so for me to be cold, it's got to be cold," Wickman says.

Susan Andrews was surprised when she noticed that people around her at a university conference were all holding coffee mugs, even though it was a hot August day. Then she realized no one was drinking coffee. The mugs were full of hot water, and the attendees were "just trying to keep warm," says Andrews, head of marketing at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.

As summer-clad office workers, conference attendees and event guests stream into meeting rooms and reception halls nationwide, many will be met with a blast of Arctic air.

"Over-chilling" is one of the top complaints of meeting planners, says Donald Young of the International Facility Management Association in Houston.

Ezra Eichelberger, a catering professor at the Culinary Institute of America, calls it "a universal problem." He remembers the room was so cold for one banquet that women were given tablecloths to wrap around themselves.

Meeting planner Steve Kemble of Dallas sees it all the time in the surveys that conference attendees mail in. "If two or three weeks later they're still thinking about the temperature, then that's an issue." He hates cold rooms. It's so frustrating "to plan a fabulous program, with a speaker you paid $100,000 for, and all you hear from people leaving is 'Brrr, it was freezing in there!' "

Kemble, for one, doesn't take it lying down. He once bought a slab of beef and hung it from a hotel's sales-office door after six pleas to turn up the heat in a meeting room that was "62 or 63 degrees" were ignored. It was up to 70 the next day.

Folks in charge of thermostats say this: You have to pre-chill so you don't overheat.

"We always make it as cold as possible prior to the event starting, because it's a better experience," says Eric Whitson, director of sales at the National Conference Center in Lansdowne, Va. That means about 65 degrees. "At first its going to be chilly to most people who enter, but the temperature goes up as those numbers build." It should end up at about 70 degrees, he says.