(And no, it’s not a dinner-and-a-movie in jean shorts.)
Negotiating your reservation
cut-off date is just the beginning.
Managing to it is the real trick.
This is the final installment in our series on room block management, where we’ve pulled back the curtain to reveal how hotels work to manage your room block and their occupancy. (Here are the prior two posts: Legos 101: General Block Management and Legos 102: Attrition.)
When it comes down to negotiating your hotel contract, few clauses have as much impact to the overall success of your event than your reservations clause and cut-off date. As a refresher, the cut-off date is the date when all of your room reservations must be made. By ”made,” I mean either the date your rooming list is due to the hotel or, if there’s no rooming list, the date when your attendees must have made their own reservations.
Any rooms left unused in your block after this date are returned to the hotel inventory and put up for general sale. And often these rooms are sold at a higher rate than your negotiated group rate. This becomes a real bummer for those who procrastinated in making their reservations (which I’m notorious for doing – ugh!).
Why Do Hotels Care about My Cut-off Date?
Before we dive into some key strategies you can use to better leverage the cut-off date, let’s quickly review why the date exists in the first place.