Las Vegas

Las Vegas has built its reputation on spectacle, and its business on meetings. Few cities can put a few thousand delegates under one roof, feed them well and still have a headline show, a residency night and a chef's table left over for the evening. The numbers do the persuading: around 150,000 hotel rooms, more than 1,100 flights a day and most hotels about fifteen minutes from the airport. Beyond the neon is the quieter, more polished end of the Strip, where the suites are serious, the spas are vast and the service is very well drilled.

For planners, the city works at any scale. Large conferences can keep everyone in one resort, from plenary to gala dinner, while smaller leadership groups do better with a private dining room, a reserved table at a show and a car waiting outside. Then go beyond the city limits: the red sandstone of Red Rock Canyon sits on the western edge of town, Hoover Dam is an easy half-day, and a helicopter turns the Grand Canyon into a morning out. What happens here, of course, goes in the post-event report.