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| Group businesses is a highly underutilized revenue source that should form an essential part of a hotel revenue mix. Groups provide leverage in pricing. And while leisure travelers may cancel on a whim, group business is sticky, operating in both peak and off-peak seasons. In addition, group customers spend more on ancillaries, have a higher propensity for repeat business, and often combine business trips with leisure vacations (“BLeisure”). Today, 86 percent of event planners fall into the tech-savvy Millennial and Gen X categories, with the vast majority of them now sourcing venues digitally. And while CareerCast.com ranks event coordinators fifth on the list of most stressful jobs in 2018, you can make their – and your sales team members’ – jobs easier with the right tools. Advances in technology are revolutionizing the meetings and events industry by automating and streamlining formerly manual processes. By adding critical pieces to your group sales toolkit, your hotel will g gain exposure to your highest valued prospects and have real-time access to accurate group demand forecasts, optimal room rate suggestions, and more, enabling your sales team to respond quicker and convert more booked business. Win
at the Law of Attraction
And once planners have nailed down their event destination, hotels still have a big opportunity to win the business because nearly half of all planners remain “somewhat uncertain” regarding specific venue. Implement software that allows you to target planners with customized and automated digital marketing campaigns that are more likely to convert. Manage
Incoming RFPs
Strong lead-scoring lets you evaluate leads by any number of factors, including profitability, availability, and propensity to spend, helping you determine in a matter of minutes versus hours, which leads are most worth pursuing. Group displacement analysis allows hotels to accurately calculate the true value of a group in comparison to other potential groups or transient business – looking beyond room rates to examine total value, including food-and-beverage spend, meeting room rental, and all non-room revenue streams. Furthermore, with the right technology, hotels gain the ability to transform turndowns into bids by automatically recommending alternative dates if the primary dates aren’t available. Optimize
& Maximize
The
convenience of the optimized pricing feature allows your sales teams to
respond to RFPs and group leads more quickly and confidently – as opposed
to wasting hours or even days waiting for approvals and risking loss of
the business. grouprev also helps you refine pattern management, allowing
you to more effectively yield around transient business and better strategize
around your optimal business mix. Hotels using grouprev see an average
lift of 8.4 percent in group revenue, and an 11.5 percent average increase
in converted group RFPs.
Benchmark Yourself & Your Competition To achieve optimal success from your group business, you must fully understand your own performance. A solid solution measures your own key performance indicators (KPIs), patterns, and progress over time, while also providing insight into the “whys” behind the numbers. Rate your progress on metrics such as your bid, turndown, and conversion rates. Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, your response times, and RFP market share. And determine your ratio of RFPs won versus lost. Once you have a clear view of your own group business performance, you can move on to see how you stack up against your competitors. How much market share do you claim? How do your soft periods compare with your comp set? Study group booking trends among your local and broader market. And identify your true competitive set, which is not necessarily made up of hotels within your local market. Advanced analytics helps you identify those hotels receiving the highest proportion of leads that your hotel also receives, no matter where in the world they’re located. By benchmarking your performance and your competition, you’re better positioned to make informed decisions concerning where you need to improve and where to best focus your resources. Forecasting
for Success
It’s possible to lose a group lead at any point in the process – from sourcing all the way through to the actual event. Incorporating digital tools and software solutions can make a crucial difference. Partner with providers that will help your hotel sales professionals attract and convert the most valuable group leads to you grow your bottom line. With the right systems in place, you can dig deep into the numbers, monitoring your analytics and performance over time in order to continuously improve, ultimately claiming larger and larger slices of the “group business” pie. About
Matt Curry, Senior Vice President, Head of Sales, The Rainmaker Group
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