Zentila Meetings Blog

But knowing why changes everything.

Let’s face it: The first time someone broke up with you was an earth-shattering moment. Life as you knew it was out the window, replaced by long, dark days in Algebra class where, it just so happened, you and your ex sat next to each other. The question I would always ask myself (and yes, it happened more than once), was simply, “Why? Why don't you like me? What did I do wrong? And why didn't I think of this when I was picking my seat in algebra class?”

Killer tips for effective hotel site inspections

This week I’m thrilled to present our first guest blogger, April Anderson. Besides being a Zentila rock star salesperson, she’s also a former member of the Gaylord Hotels Global Sales team, and queen of the yummiest caramels the world has ever tasted. (Wanna learn more about April? Here you go!)

So it’s with this high level of awe and sticky teeth that I bring to you April’s killer tips for effective hotel site inspections.

A big part of why Zentila is able to deliver such awesome hotel offers is that we understand how hotels salespeople think – heck, I used to be one. So we built Zentila with some real hotel sales “rocket fuel” to motivate sales managers to drop everything and respond to a Zentila RFP before any others.

One big bucket of rocket fuel comes from your Zentila Short List Date.

This is the date that you select to tell the hotels whether their proposal is good enough to stay in the deal. It narrows the results. That’s some powerful stuff to a hotel sales person. They’re more motivated than ever to respond with just the right proposal or – ZAP – they could be out. And it gets so much better.

Concession Month rolls on here in Zentila-land. Over the last few weeks, we've tackled the most common concession requests, and even got a peek into how hotels think about concessions. If you've missed any, below are links to the other posts:

It's Better than Shark Week! 
Do Hotels Love Offering Concessions?

So let's tackle some more of the most popular concession requests, building on the first batch of concessions that we covered a couple of weeks ago. Think of these as "intermediate requests" -- a little more advanced than the basic concessions. And they can drive a ton of value to your group.

Killer concession #4: Suite Upgrades

We Know Salespeople. And We Know Fun.

(And we know some salespeople who are a lot of fun.)

Here in Zentila-land, we like concessions so much that we've devoted the whole month of March to them. It’s kind of like Shark Week except, well, it lasts a whole month. Most importantly, it doesn't contain any gory scenes of chum-filled waters.

Making hotels' Space-to-Rooms Ratio work for you

As a recovering salesperson, I have a love/hate relationship with math. Sure, I love numbers with dollar signs in front of them ... most of the time, at least. But the prospect of repeating high school trigonometry gives me cold sweats.

How to get the best performance from performance clauses

I get a lot of questions about negotiating contracts with hotels. Among the more popular is around “out clauses” for performance – the contract language that determines what happens if a hotel doesn't provide the level of service and product expected.

The reason people gather for face-to-face meetings each year is the riveting content presented at those meetings. But what people really remember are the banquet events (i.e., catered breakfast, lunch, and dinner). They provide the opportunity for attendees to take a break, come together, and create bonds. It’s here where much of the day’s sessions are put into perspective, discussed and debated, and where the real value of the event often begins to take shape for each attendee. It’s also where a fair portion of your meeting budget is spent and where hotels make a nice chunk of profit. In order to protect this revenue stream, hotels almost always include a minimum Food & Beverage spend in their contracts.

During my hotel sales days, I always found it funny when a customer would attempt to negotiate down our hotel food and beverage minimums, when it was clear by the size of the group that they were going to end up spending more than what we were asking. Now I get the premise: Less committed spend means less overall commitment to the hotel. But when groups do blow past their F&B minimums, they get no additional benefit for the spend.

The biggest change that has taken place over the last several years is the adoption of eRFPs, the technology that enables planners to send their meeting requests to hotels in just a couple of clicks and magically receive complete proposals in a few hours. Or at least that’s how it was intended.

The reality is that the technology that was supposed to save so much time is now the #1 reason you’re not receiving timely, complete hotel proposals. The problem with eRFP technology is that it’s made it too easy to send requests to way too many hotels. It’s not unusual today to see a single meeting sent to 40, 50 or even 90 hotels at one time.  In 2010, Zentila coined a term that is now standard in the industry to describe this phenomenon: RFP SPAM.

Hotel group sales offices are receiving more meeting leads than ever before. They should be happy about this, right? Wrong. Because they’re actually closing far fewer of those leads than at any time in history. As a result, hotel sales managers must sort through the pile of RFP’s and decipher between the ones that appear to be more likely to book and the ones that are just spam.

We have focused several posts on how planners can get hotel sales managers' attention and help them to offer the best meeting deals.

Here are some tips to help you get better and faster responses to your eRFP: