Two new online tools from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) are designed to help people make stronger presentations and to help travelers determine which tradeshow would be best for their purposes.

The tools, "How to Feel Confident for a Presentation…and Overcome Speech Anxiety," by Amy Newman, and "A Location Planning Decision-Support Tool for Tradeshows and Conventions," by Hyunjeong (Spring) Han and Rohit Verma, are available at no charge from the CHR. Both allow users to customize their input according to their own particular situation.

"I developed the presentation tool because I noticed that many people had trouble making presentations because they were nervous, and not because they were poor presenters," said Newman, a senior lecturer at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration.

"So I collected as many presentation strategies as I could find, with a goal of helping people become more confident in their presentations."

The tool offers a comprehensive list of strategies that the presenter can use before, during, and after a presentation. Users are invited to select the most appropriate strategies for their situation. Newman's goal is that even the most nervous presenters can improve how they think and feel about their delivery skillsâ€"and how they perform in front of an audience.

The strategic decision tool is intended to assist travelers in comparing the value of attending up to four tradeshows or conventions. Based on a multi-year research project that discerned tradeshow participants' preferences, the tool can be used in making an effective location planning decision for tradeshows considering attendees' and exhibitors' preferences.

"Professor Han and I distilled information from over 2,500 tradeshow participants to create this decision support tool," said Verma, who is the Singapore Tourism Board Distinguished Professor and a professor of service operations management at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. "We had the assistance of the ASAE Foundation in collecting data, which helped us develop a large pool of respondents. We found, for instance, that a tradeshow's location is one of the top selection criteria. Exhibitors wanted the largest crowd possible, but attendees preferred a more modest size crowd. We've built the decision tool around this information."

Han is an assistant professor at the Higher School of Economics at the National Research University in Moscow, Russia.