At check-in, the receptionists all had badges: 'Hilton Welcomes The Pampered Chef'. Perhaps I should have felt a little unloved, but it's a price I'm willing to pay if it means I can stay at a convention hotel. More comfortable than hanging around a railway station, you can, as I did, sit undisturbed in the Chicago Hilton's not-terribly-authentic Irish pub (the Kitty O'Shea) and watch strangers with a shared background in widgets flirt over a discussion of last year's sales figures. Even though convention hotels can be a bit of a lottery I like to think it brings out the amateur social anthropologist in me. Will you end up with the pharmaceutical salespeople (dedicated party animals in my experience) or the university administrators' association (predictably low-key)?
Convention hotels tend to have wi-fi, which is why I now know that The Pampered Chef is the new Tupperware and I could pay off all my debts by learning to Dream Big and flog kitchen implements with the help of a few cookery parties for my friends. Once you have found who is meeting in your hotel (the flimsy board in the lobby is becoming outdated - one of the hotel's television stations will often outline the day's events), all you really have to do is hang around for the floorshow.
A really good convention hotel is big enough to have clashing conferences. The Chicago Hilton has 1,544 rooms, which means that on one visit I was privileged to encounter a Catholic charity (where men wore slightly sinister white satin robes) being forced to mix uneasily in the lifts with a group of men, all of whom had bulldog clips decorating their black leather jackets. A convention hotel is heaven for devotees of the off-beat (photographer Martin Parr would love it). It is a form of 24-hour theatre where banshee-style screams punctuate an awards ceremony (Pampered Chef, I presume, since it seemed to be a competition to make a cook's outfit out of loo rolls). I've stayed in one in Sweden where a group of teachers all wore kimonos (it was a Japanese-themed hotel) and sang intricate three-verse drinking songs. 'We're planning next year's lessons,' one of them said to me the next day as we sat in the hot pool. Above all, I love convention hotels because I can stay there and watch other people work.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
