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EyeforTravel: Tips for Converting Group
Hotel Business When You Are Drowning in Leads
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Group hotel business is looking increasingly healthy. Big names like Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide have all recently forecast that group bookings would drive growth this year.

They know this because as the economic outlook has improved they have seen booking windows widen and spend on meetings rise. However, at the same time, rising competition has made securing those all-important conversions much tougher. However, it’s a battle worth fighting as depending on the type of hotel, group hotel bookings can contribute around a third of hotel revenues.

Among the most challenging aspects of managing this side of the business are the ability to have a clear picture of what leads are in the pipeline, researching alternate dates and knowing which to respond to first, says Cvent’s GM, Jeffery Emenecker, who manages the group’s Decision Street team which helps hotels manage group demand.

Until recently this has not been automated but the rise of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has changed all that. However, these systems can be both a blessing and a curse if not managed properly.

The blessing being that meeting planners can now create detailed requests for proposals that drive interest in the hotel. The curse: that it creates more demand and as a result more work, leaving hotels under constant pressure to respond to leads. As a result, sales people are very often spread thin across proposals, says Emenecker, which can lead to a cookie cutter, cut and paste response.

But that doesn’t work in today’s world where meetings planners are looking for a truly unique experience; and so it is crucial for hotels to deliver on this by responding with consideration to the needs of each client.

“The quality of the response really does matter,” Emenecker says.

Another tricky challenge is managing function space – especially true for hotels with longer booking windows. As Tom Faust, VP of sales for Omni Hotels & Resorts pointed out at a conference last year, managing meeting space availability may not be glamorous but is “probably the most important thing we do on the group side”.

Monitoring function space metrics, getting to grips with the space to guest room ratio, taking a multivariate approach to lead evaluation and understanding total revenue and total profitability in a holistic way are among the examples of best practice but Emenecker’s 3 top tips are to:

• Ensure key characteristics are always reviewed on a lead
• Evaluate or suggest alternate dates. Dedicating energy to researching alternative dates presents a real opportunity to improve ROI.
• Combine pace reports and funnel quality together to understand blind spots where marketing/prospecting is needed

• Develop some method of lead scoring
• Standardise characteristics each lead is evaluated upon – focus on margin / profit
• Focus creative energy on the best leads – don’t use first in / first out

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About EyeforTravel Ltd.
Founded in 1997, EyeforTravel Ltd. is a leading business intelligence provider for the online travel industry. EyeforTravel drives forward innovation in the online travel industry through news, conferences, research and reports.