by Shawna Suckow, CMP 
An amazing thing happened to me recently and I am still in disbelief. If serendipity is real, it happened to me last week and I still have the goose bumps to prove it. 
I wrote an article called ‘Do Something Unexpected’ for the April issue of Midwest Meetings about an amazing example of unexpected hospitality I experienced. In short, I left my laptop on a plane… on the last flight of the night… in the winter… and my book manuscript was on that laptop. Chad Johnson from Southwest Airlines performed an amazing act of humble hospitality, going to great lengths (especially by airline standards) to find and return the laptop and refused a rather insistent tip in return.
Fast forward to last week. I vowed that the next time I was at the Humphrey terminal of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, I would track down Chad and give him a copy of the magazine along with a card of thanks. No big deal, right? Wrong. Last week was my chance and an amazing sequence of events transpired.

by Shawna Suckow, CMP
Meeting planners change lives.

I’ve spent a lot of time up in the air lately with our distant industry cousins, the flight attendants. I’ve had plenty of free time to be inside my head (if United offers Wi-Fi on board any of my flights, they’re doing a great job of hiding it from me). On one particularly long haul, I reflected on a parallel between flight attendants and meeting planners: lack of credibility. For those of you old enough to remember, flight attendants used to be called stewardesses, ‘sexy stews,’ ‘flying waitresses’ and probably worse.