Zentila Meetings Blog

Supply and demand

It’s a fact. Hotel demand is far outpacing the supply right now. While hotels may want to accommodate your group over your preferred dates, it's more likely they can’t. They just don’t have the availability they had even a few years ago. Giving hotels the opportunity to find other dates for your meeting not only opens up more options but can also earn you generous savings in return for your flexibility.

Good times for hoteliers: Occupancy is at an all-time high, room rates continue to climb, and demand growth is expected to outpace supply growth through 2017.

But have no fear, meeting planners! These tips below will help you negotiate killer deals – even in a seller’s market.

Booking a meeting can be a bit like buying a car.  You compile a list of models in your price range. Once you’ve had a chance to do your homework and test drive a few cars, you narrow your list down to your preferred vehicles.

Here’s where you have negotiating power.

You have proven you are serious about buying, but haven’t yet committed. Your car salesman is all ears now, you might even hear the old line “what do I have to do to put you in this car today”.

Negotiations have changed dramatically with the existing market conditions. The key to getting great deals on your company meetings is knowing what value your meeting is bringing to the hotel.

It’s that time of the year when many of us reflect on the changes we would like to make in the new year. We consider changes to our personal lives, but it’s also a good time to look at changes to our professional lives. Here are five tips for meeting planners that will broaden your options, reduce risk, and increase your productivity!

(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.

Managing your room block successfully 
means understanding how the hotel thinks.

This is the second of three blog posts on managing your room block. Click here to read the first post about how hotels manage your block and the concept of “Blind Cuts."

I’m dedicating this post to the concept of attrition – the most scrambled, chewed-up term the hotel industry has in its contracts. Hotels have figured out as many ways to calculate attrition as there are Legos in Legoland. (I know – it’s the same metaphor used in my last post … but it works!)

Managing your room block successfully
means understanding how the hotel thinks. 

Supercharge your RFP by sharing your meeting history.

In my last Zmail, I laid out the case for why your meeting history is so important to hotels and the secret strategies they employ to get your prior year’s meeting history. This week I’ll answer common questions about how hotels use your history and how you can get better deals from hotels because of it.

(And I’m not talking about our forefathers’ Outlook calendars.)

This is part one of a two-part series on the importance of meeting history.