There are varying degrees of maturity in Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) hotel contracting and inevitably, most hoteliers want to learn how to avoid the onerous contract negotiations in these environments. Procurement may be involved and many organizations are moving to their own hotel contracts vs. using the hotel’s paper. Even in a seller’s market, organizations want to be in the driver’s seat of racing down the road of terms and conditions. And, who can blame them? Many organizations spend millions of dollars with hotel chains and procurement leaders expect to use master service agreements to reduce overall risk and cost, and improve consistency across the whole enterprise.

Whereas ad-hoc contracting for a meeting or event requires the meeting planner and property leaders to negotiate terms, strategic sourcing usually requires procurement, meeting leaders, general counsel and chain-wide leaders to negotiate terms for an entire organization’s meetings and events. Moreover, when meeting/event contracting is integrated with transient travel contracting, the process penitentiary causes confinement for months with legal beagles shredding their opponent’s side of the contract. When hoteliers understand the SMM Hotel Contracting Maturity Model© and how it affects their negotiation strategies, then the hotel can author terms that satisfy their clients and ...