| Winter 2000
Why can’t a meeting be booked in 30 minutes? Many meeting planners are
wondering just this as they endure the cumbersome and time-consuming task.
Indeed, let’s think about the steps it takes to book a meeting:
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Find the phone number of the hotel that the planner may be interested in
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Call during business hours and provide meeting details to the sales assistant
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Wait for the sales manager to return the call
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Repeat meeting details to the sales manager
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Repeat this same process for every hotel the planner may be interested
in
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Collect proposals, review, and make decision on the hotel
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Call the hotel and likely play phone tag with the sales manager
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Work out details with the sales manager
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Wait for paperwork
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Complete paperwork.
This process takes an average of 10 days to complete. We, in the hotel
industry, have made it difficult for meeting planners to do business with
us. We are wasting valuable sales resources to field inquiries instead
of proactively building relationships. Some hotels lose business because
their sales staff does not get back to the planner expediently.
This situation presents a unique opportunity for progressive companies
in the industry.
Through years of corporate organizational restructuring and downsizing,
the number of full-time meeting planners has declined significantly. Most
companies do not have a meeting services department any more. Most individuals
who plan meetings have other full-time responsibilities. Many of them have
had no training in the area and have little idea as to where to begin.
However, they do know they have no time to waste.
Analyzing the group meeting mix at hotels, most meetings involve less
than 100 peak room nights. This type of meeting usually has very straight-forward
requirements. Most likely, there are no unusual requirements in meeting
room or audio-video set up. Even the food and beverage requirements are
usually simple (e.g., continental breakfast buffet, lunch buffet, etc.).
If the requirements are so straight for-ward, why can’t the process be
simpler? Indeed, many meeting planners have asked the same question. Hotels
are allowing transient guests to search availability and rates, as well
as book a room on-line. Why can’t planners book a meeting on-line?
All major hotel chains have been working on simplifying the meeting
planning process. These chains, and a proliferation of meeting planning
Web sites, provide a good search engine for planners to locate hotels on
the Internet. They also provide an electronic request for proposal (RFP)
to capture high-level meeting requirements to be forwarded to hotels. However,
none of them allow planners to check availability or rates, let alone complete
the booking on-line. These Web sites are primarily lead generators for
hotels. Meeting planners who use them still face the same inefficient process.
Despite the modest functionality with all these Web sites, meeting planner
reception has been very encouraging. One well-funded meeting planner site
has stated that they process over 1,000 RFPs per month. Hotel chains have
also reported that their company Web sites process an average of 100 leads
per month. Considering the historical and anticipated growth of consumer
on-line reservations, these numbers will likely increase exponentially
over time. It is a strong indication that meeting planners desire to simplify
their job and are willing to conduct business on-line.
Some progressive hotel companies have already begun overcoming cultural,
operational, and system interface challenges. By leveraging booking engines
they have built for their Web sites, and using software programming advances
such as Application Programming Interface and Extensible Markup Language,
they are extracting data from their disparate systems and building capabilities
for meeting planners to check rates and availability (guest room and function
space) on-line. Furthermore, they have designed step-by-step and streamlined
templates to capture meeting details. They aim to empower meeting planners
to do business with them anytime, anywhere, and have set goals to dramatically
reduce the time and effort it takes to book a meeting.
Tips
on Creating an On-line RFP
If a meeting planner has taken the time to provide detailed information
to you, he/she is more likely to do business with you. This is because
they have made an investment in you. The key is to entice meeting planners
to provide that detailed information to you. For your Web site, you may
want to create an electronic RFP so the meeting planner can conduct business
with you at his/her leisure. The RFP template should have the following
components:
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Contact Profile — Have input masks plus address
and area code validation in place to ensure you are capturing good data.
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Meeting Information — Capture meeting details
and dates of meeting. Make sure you ask if dates are flexible and what
the flexibility is.
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Guest Room Requirements — Capture requirements
for number of rooms required by day and bed type.
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Function Space Requirements — Capture type
of room set up (drop down menu to select classroom, theatre, etc.) and
number of attendees by time and day.
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Food and Beverage Requirements — Create a
streamlined menu of the most popular breakfast and lunch items (e.g., buffet
du jour) and capture the menu and guarantee requirements by time and day.
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Special Requirements — Free-form text box
for meeting planners to convey special requirements for the above (e.g.,
five vegetarian plates in the food and beverage section).
Because you are trying to capture detailed information, it would be good
to separate out these areas into different Web forms and have a “save”
button so planners can return to complete this information. Also, if you
have a “clone a meeting” functionality, the planner will not have to provide
the details over and over again. Imagine a planner with back-to-back training
sessions.
This template offers a step-by-step guide for planners who may not be
familiar with the planning process. While the initial filling out of the
template may take some time, it dramatically reduces the time spent later
to collect this information. If explained properly, planners should be
agreeable. If the hotel creates an interface between the database housing
this data to the Sales Catering Automation System, it will save the administrative
staff a lot of effort and time. All in all, you have made life easier for
all concerned. |
The hotel company that succeeds in launching a meeting planner Web site
where planners can check rates and availability and complete meeting details/booking
on-line will gain a tremendous competitive advantage. They can win revenue
and reduce cost by:
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Creating top-of-mind awareness in meeting planners with a highly desirable
value proposition (dramatically streamlined meeting planning process that
will save a lot of time),
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Freeing up sales professionals to focus on building relationships instead
of fielding inquiries,
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Enabling national/regional sales to finalize a meeting on behalf of a hotel
(by leveraging the same process),
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Reducing distribution cost, and
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Streamlining administrative work for meeting planners and the hotels.
Up to this time, most hotel companies’ Internet distribution strategy has
been to focus on the individual transient guest (B2C). The next frontier
will be to enable meeting planners to plan meetings and book on-line (B2B).
So, why can’t a meeting be booked in 30 minutes? Soon, the question will
be why not?
Tips
on Managing Your Inquiries and
Referrals / Leads
| You spend valuable resources to build your brand. Now you get an inquiry
or a referral/lead. These people are interested in doing business with
you. Are you responding to them properly? You know the planner will probably
select the hotel that responds first because he/she doesn’t have the time
to waste. Here are some suggestions:
Managing Leads and Referrals/Inquiries
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Schedule sales managers on a rotational basis so someone is assigned every
day to respond to inquiries and leads, regardless of market segment focus.
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Have a process in place to track inquiries and leads (a paper log system
is better than nothing).
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Towards the end of the day, have the director of sales check on the status
of every inquiry and lead that came in that day.
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Have a trace system in place to monitor the status of the inquiries and
referrals/ leads.
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The general manager should spot check every week to ensure the process
is working as designed.
Capture Details of Leads and Referrals/Inquiries
In profiling the lead or inquiry, capture details of the meeting in
the Sales & Catering Automation System or in a database.
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It will save the meeting planner from having to repeat this information
later (a great source of frustration).
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It will save redundant data entry.
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Even if you don’t book the business, you have created a better picture
on historical demand (unconstrained demand), which can aid in your yield
decisions later.
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It builds a marketing database.
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It builds justification for more meeting space or guest rooms if you have
to constantly turn down business due to lack of function space or guest
room availability.
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© 2000 KPMG LLP |
