International travelers, according to Travel Industry of America (TIA), spent $106 billion in the United States in 2006. A 1% increase in the number of inbound visitors would provide an additional $12 billion in expenditures…create 150,000 new jobs…increase payroll by $3 billion…and generate $2 billion more in federal, state and local tax revenue.

IBM has announced that it will begin offering U.S. employees specialized saving accounts for training and education. The “learning accounts” are modeled on 401(k) retirement savings plans; IBM will contribute 50 cents for every dollar paid in by an employee to improve their skills. “This is truly path breaking,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School told The New York Times. “The significance is that it’s controlled by the individual…it reinvents how a company develops the social contract with its workers in a highly mobile, global economy.” IBM has earmarked $40 million over the next three years for contributions to the learning accounts,which will supplement its own $600 million annual budget for training. Expect a sea change in training meetings as other companies follow suit.

Take your pick, depending on your definition of what constitutes a “meeting.” The traditional threshold for a “group” has been 10 sleeping rooms or more. A recent study by PhoCusWright arbitrarily redefined the category to include “two or more households traveling overnight to one or more location(s) for a common purpose or event, be it social, business or some other reason.” That’s much too broad for me, as is the survey’s estimate of 2006 group and meeting revenue of $l64 billion.

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