Guest Liaison

A Guest Liaison is a person on the committee who is assigned to a particular Guest of Honor, to be their point of contact throughout the year and to shepherd them through the convention during the event. If you have a pair of Guests who are a couple, it is fine to have a single liaison for those two guests. Not every convention assigns liaisons to their guests, but if you have the people power to do so you will find it very useful and your guests will appreciate it.

A Guest Liaison should be a responsible person, preferably with their own car. It is nice to recruit someone who is enthusiastic about that particular GoH, but you want to make sure they will treat them with respect and be able to assist them without being too starstruck. Guest Liaisons should always remember that GoHs are people too.

Optimally, Guest Liaisons should not have any responsibilities during a convention other than to liaise their guest.

Guest Liaisons are primarily responsible for making sure that their Guest gets everywhere they need to be on time, and also for making sure the Guest is fed and has all their other needs attended to. This may include transporting the Guest to and from the airport and area restaurants, pharmacies, etc. Making sure a guest gets to program items on time may include extracting them from a group of fans or another type of conversation. The liaison should be prepared to have to watch the clock for their GoH.

Different Guests, of course, require different levels of attention from their liaisons, and different types of accomodation from the convention. If you are trying to figure out how needy a guest is going to be, it can be helpful to speak to someone from another convention where that person has been a guest. Generally speaking, however, the needs of an artist GoH are ten to twenty times as time-consuming as those of other guests as there are crating, shipping, agency, and publications concerns that do not apply to other kinds of guests.

Some conventions have someone who arranges all the travel for their guests, but for many conventions that responsibility falls to the Guest Liaison as well. It is most convenient for the convention if a liaison is prepared to front the money for guest travel and other expenses, and then provide receipts to the convention and get reimbursed.

A convention should provide all liaisons with a schedule of what the convention needs the liaison to do. Different departments may provide the liaison with lists of questions to ask their Guests, as to hotel accomodation preferences, green room needs and desires, publications needs such as bios, CVs, and photos, and programming preferences. Liaisons should follow up with their GoHs to get responses to these requests in the timeline that's needed by the requesting departments.