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Account icon An icon in the shape of a person’s head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. A holiday-party planner for companies like Airbnb and Saks Fifth Avenue says today’s million-dollar events are nothing like they were in the ’90s. Here’s what his job is like. This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers.
Become an Insider and start reading now. He said company holiday parties were getting longer and less boozy and were mostly virtual. In the 1990s, when Gen Xers dominated the workforce, corporate Christmas parties were boozy, messy bashes, the event planner J. Today’s events, he said, are very different. It’s not like my era when everyone got trashed and had to hold their hair back to vomit on the street — they don’t do that anymore,” he said. Millennials will sit there or mingle and hold just one beer for the entire event. If I was selling beer, I wouldn’t make any money.
The budget that’s saved on the bar tab is reallocated to food and, most importantly, gifts, he said. It’s not cheap stuff,” he said. Then you’ll see people walking around with one, maybe with the Salesforce logo on it. The Oscar de la Renta event at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Benavides, 66, has tracked these changes over three decades running Ideas Events, a high-end firm he founded in 1992 with offices in New York and San Francisco. It specializes in splashy bashes for corporate and philanthropic clients, working with Silicon Valley staples like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Facebook as well as Saks Fifth Avenue, St.
Benavides is a hospitality lifer: Having grown up in San Jose, California, with a single mom who owned Mexican restaurants, he always felt comfortable in the food industry, he said. He signed up for a management training program with Hyatt when he was 22, eventually focusing on its catering and conventions business. When Coca-Cola’s events team, one of his clients at the time, suggested he set up his own business to help with an event in Hawaii, Ideas Events was born. Costs — and expectations — are rising, he said. A lot of people ask, ‘How many parties do you do a year? Now it’s not quantity but quality, because budgets have climbed. 1 million, he said, adding that flowers alone cost significantly more than they used to.