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Your hotel partner, whether on property at an independent or chain hotel or at an above property level such as a National or Global Sales Office (NSO/GSO) should be acting as a helpful extension of your Strategic Meetings Management team. Hoteliers, listen up! You have a tremendous amount of information and support that you can offer to your client that will benefit them, and increase your value from generic supplier to trusted advisor. Although I am speaking mainly to hoteliers, these principles apply to other suppliers as well.
You have the ability to bring a lot to the partnership:
· Be proactive in all things; do not wait to be asked. This will position you as more thoughtful and more strategic, and as looking at the big picture, not just waiting to respond to a stand alone RFP
· Share best practices from other clients and from your peers with your clients. You are in a unique position to see a variety of processes, business models and innovations, proactively share this when not a conflict of interest
· Share with your clients the spend data you have for them. If it is early on in the development of an SMMP, they may not have this information. If they are already collecting their own data, it is great validation to compare the data. Some of the data that would be interesting to your clients would be:
o Overall number of meetings
o Total spend, ideally combined with transient spend, if applicable
o Who is signing the contracts (it could be 3rd parties, administrative assistants, or?)
o Outstanding cancellation fees
o Aggregate savings based on concessions, rate reductions and other negotiations
· If you are dealing with procurement in addition to the meeting planning team, be sure to understand what is most important to each of them, as frequently they have different concerns
· You can help to educate staff on new company meeting policy. If a meeting request comes from a department that should not be calling the hotel directly, let them know the proper channels to use
· Don't assume your client knows what the positive outcomes could be if they shifted more market share to you. Be sure to have that conversation so that they might see increased savings and you might see increased sales
We referenced standard hotel contracts in the previous "Going Global" issue of Keeping it SiMMPle. Let's dig a little deeper into this idea. Standard hotel contracts are so appealing because it eliminates the need to re-negotiate contract Terms and Conditions (Ts and Cs) for each and every contract. Once there is a standard agreement in place you are able to focus on the business terms of the contract, such as dates, rates, meetings space and concessions.
I agree that it can be a time consuming process to come to agreement with the legal counsel from your organization and that of the hotel company, but the upfront work really pays off when you are doing numerous contracts with the same hotel entity.
Standard contracts can be done with:
· Hotel chains or independent hotels that are frequently used
· A specific property that might be used frequently for day use or catering only meetings such as properties close to headquarters or regional offices,
· Day meeting package terms that include set meal, room rental, and audio/visual costs in addition to set Ts and Cs. The benefit is that anyone planning a meeting for the company can feel confident that they are getting pre-negotiated pricing; and the added bonus is reduced negotiating and planning time.
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