Maybe you’re thinking you can walk the walk, but can you talk the talk? Event planner talk that is. If you stood as a fly on the wall at the East of Ellie office, we might as well be speaking another language.

This event #dreamteam can finish each other’s sentences with abbreviations and acronyms galore. What are we really saying? A few of our most common event planner lingo phrases below..

Plus Plus (++)

Oh how we wish this stood for extra sugar and extra cream in our coffee, but unfortunately it means more $$. If tax and gratuities are not included in the per person price meal price, venues will usually add on a (++) indicating tax and gratuity will need to be added onto that initial number.

Final Headcount

The rule with this one is, you can only go up, you can’t go down! Usually 1-2 weeks out from your event, venues and caterers require a final headcount as to how many guests you will have attending. For RSVP events, this is fairly easy, but for ticketed events, planners have to take their best guess as to how many will be attending on event day; taking into account last minute tickets sales. Once you supply this headcount number, you can always increase it by a few, but you cannot decrease.

BEO (Banquet Event Order)

Bacon Egg Omelet? Close! BEO, or Banquet Event Order, is a detailed document that provides venue instructions and a timeline for how the banquet, meeting, or event will be run. In other words, this gets the planner and venue on the exact same page about what’s going on event day to avoid any time or menu confusion.

Exclusive Vendor

This sounds super fancy, but it’s really just describing a venue’s policy on vendor use. Some venues say bring in whoever! Some say, please pick from our preferred list of different vendors, and some have exclusive vendors, meaning you have no choice but to use them for catering, a/v or rentals.

Island Display

A term that describes events only on private islands? Unfortunately no, this term applies to trade shows in which your exhibit space is all by itself, surrounded by four aisles instead of another company. We’ll keep dreaming over here in the meantime.

Air walls

No, these aren’t a technology craze or the walls of the future. Most commonly found in hotel ballrooms, air walls are movable wall panels used to partition a larger area into smaller rooms. They are most frequently used to make divide larger ballrooms into smaller spaces, and can quickly open to enlarge a space.

Room Block

Well, we’re not quite literally blocking off hotel rooms, but to avoid hearing the dreaded “sold out” or “booked up”, room blocks definitely help.  Contacting a hotel to reserve a room block from anywhere between 10 rooms or all of their rooms (otherwise known as a buyout) is the best way to preserve accommodations for your event guests before others use all the inventory.

This is only a preview to the plethora of event lingo used around the EOE office and slack channels daily. Still confused as to all this language and what we as event planners do? Check it out here. See the results of all our event planner style chat here.

Definitions sourced from Event Interface