A $30,000 LOSS.
If you are a marketing manager, director of marketing, communications manager, marketing assistant, administrative assistant, or executive assistant you are going to want to read this.
$30,000 is a lot of money right? Imagine telling your senior leader that overnight you are $30,000 over budget… and then imagine they have to tell their senior leader.
SCARY! Unfortunately, this happens and sometimes this burden is even higher.
A company leader often tasks one of their employees with planning a large-scale event. That person’s expertise or “day job’ is not in event planning or contract negotiation and they find themselves in foreign territory.
An issue such as sleeping room attrition is not something they wake up thinking about every day or they may not have past attendance history to help them understand the pick-up pattern.
Companies lose thousands of dollars each year because they task an employee with a responsibility that is not their expertise. To be honest, when an attrition issue arises, it’s usually not their fault, as this is not their skill set.
Let's consider this: typically no one from your company has the time capacity to monitor the individual registration process in real-time including something like pre or post accommodation requests. And, if you do not have a 3rd party managing this process keeping a pulse or following the trend on the process, it’s possible you may fall sort on your required room block pick-up.
Now, what does that mean to you, your company and your budget… maybe $30,000!!
There are a few tools that can help send you red flags, as an example, pops-up notes that read “contact your meeting planner for pre/post assistance”. What naturally happens when there are no rooms available pre or post-convention block is that the attendee quickly jumps on the internet to browse another site to find a room at another nearby hotel that can accommodate their entire stay, possibly at a lower rate. Since the group is not “required” to stay at the host hotel, this now may create a financial liability for your company and your budget. It is true that other factors could cause attrition but this is one factor that could have been avoided.
When a company signs a hotel contract there are always performance guarantees that your company has to agree to. Hopefully, your meeting planner has negotiated some breathing room (allowable attrition) to allow for some slippage. If your group’s performance does not meet this minimum, penalties start to stack up. It only takes attrition of 150 rooms at $200 to have a $30,000 problem!
Having a professional meeting planner can help mitigate these shortfalls and possibly renegotiate with a win-win outcome turning YOUR performance into a success with your company, your boss, and your budget.
Let us help you succeed as your professional meeting planner! We can save you money on your next event! Call us at 407.948.5706 or visit our website at OCMG.net.
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