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: