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.

"Once it gets too hot, you can't cool the room down," says Elise Enloe of Attention to Details in Oviedo, Fla. Chilling is essential because "once you put 500 sweaty bodies in the room, all drinking and dancing and giving off body heat, you can't do anything about it."

Lisa Stangl, who helps plan meetings for Carlson Hotels Worldwide in Minneapolis, says larger meeting spaces are commonly set at 68 degrees because of the body-warmth factor.

The engineers weigh in

There's only one problem with this logic, says Kent Peterson, past president of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers: It's flat-out wrong. The whole idea of getting a room cold before the people come flies in the face of ASHRAE's 114 years of experience, Peterson says.

If you have to pre-cool a room, it's because something's seriously out of whack with the air-conditioning system, he says. "You should start out at 74 degrees, and as the temperature starts to rise up to 78, the air conditioning system will turn on and keep the temperature down."

And no excuses about the addition of all those heat-producing bodies. That should have been taken into consideration when the system was designed, he says. "Cooling load calculations" are based on how many people will be in the space and what activities they'll be engaged in, whether it's dancing or sitting. "Our industry is very good at doing these calculations," he says.

Peterson says many rooms are chilled to dehumidify the air. "Instead of implementing an energy-efficient design that has a dedicated system to dehumidify the outside air, they're running their air-conditioning system at full load in order to reduce the amount of moisture."

Putting it in writing

Enough conference planners have gotten goose bumps that some are writing temperatures into their contracts.

Heidi Longton, director of convention and meetings for the Northeastern Retail Lumber Association, based in Rensselaer, N.Y., says she has written into contracts that she be allowed "access to the thermostat so I can adjust as requested."

One group that really hates the cold is yoga instructors. Erin Adams of Erin Adams Events near Los Angeles plans about nine yoga conferences a year. She says it's a struggle to keep the rooms warm enough so people don't injure themselves.

"When I'm booking a place, one of the stipulations is that I have to be able to adjust the temperature and it has to start out at least at 72 degrees, and if I need it to get to 75 degrees, I have to be able to change it.

"Every hotel we go to has a problem," she says. Even in Fort Lauderdale, where temperatures can be steamy, "the hotel was Antarctica. No amount of complaining was able to change the temperature."

Blue-with-cold meeting attendees may be getting some relief from the environmental movement. More events are boasting "green" features, such as energy efficiency at the meeting site.

Business Week columnist Bruce Weinstein says: "With our environment becoming an increasing concern, cranking the AC isn't just wasteful, it's unethical. It's also bad for business, since savvy meeting planners will not recommend such facilities to their colleagues, or rebook in future years."

Some welcome the chill

Guides for green living routinely suggest that rooms be kept at 78 in the warmer months. But many planners say the idea is going to get the cold shoulder from conference-goers.

Whitson of the National Conference Center says the groups he sees don't want to compromise their comfort.

"They support doing what's right for the environment, but they don't want to pay for it. And they may not want to be uncomfortable, as well."

Then there are those who want a chill in the air.

Canadian business speaker Cameron Herold asks for it. Speakers "get all ballrooms set colder during the daytimes (after lunch sessions especially) to keep people awake."

Meeting planner Debby Goedeke of the Albany County Convention and Visitors Bureau in Albany, N.Y., says clients often ask that ballrooms and meeting rooms be kept colder so that attendees will stay alert. "They want their attendees cold, crazy as that sounds."

Eric Papp of Tampa-based Generation Y Consulting is in that camp. He speaks about 13 times a month in hotels and likes to have it "a little cold because it keeps people alert."

Then there's the male/female clothing divide.

"Women have a tendency to dress lighter than men and therefore are more sensitive to temperature. Women may be adorned in dresses, evening gowns or skirts. Whereas men wear suits to business meetings and social events and therefore are dressed in layers of clothing," says John O'Mahoney of the New York City catering firm Chef & Co.

When Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., recently held its centennial gala dinner in Los Angeles, the hotel ballroom felt "close to freezing," says Rae Lynn Rucker. "Everything was fabulous, the food was great," says Rucker, who works in the school's events and marketing department. She wore a "calf-length black slip dress with a gold crochet overlay."

But no one got to see it. The room was so cold, she had to go out and get her wool trench coat from the car and wore it all night.

Defensive dressing is key, says Carol Lei, a team development and diversity trainer with Adjunct Faculty in San Francisco. She does corporate trainings all over the country. "It's colder in hot places, and then it's hot in cold places," she says.

She always brings a professional jacket that will go over whatever she's wearing and never wears V-necks.

A design opportunity

Susan Southerland of Just Marry! wedding planning in Orlando sees a sales opportunity for the right clothing designer.

"It would be really nice to have something really beautiful designed to go with a formal gown that kept you warm," she says. The wraps sold to go over fancy dresses "are beautiful, but they're sheer and they're really not warm like a wool sweater."

The one consolation is that even the engineers who design the systems get frozen out on occasion. As head of ASHRAE, Peterson spent a lot of time at meetings in hotels. The worst experience he ever had was at a hotel in Denver, where the organization's board was meeting.

"I don't think it was over 60 degrees in there," Peterson says. "We tried all sorts of things. We even put a bag of ice on the thermostat. It's pretty sad when you have a roomful of air conditioning engineers and we were freezing."

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