Lodging Interactive - Online Group Sales Techniques

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. October 14, 2008

FEBRUARY 21, 2007. There are two types of hotel group and meeting sales prospects. There are the professional meeting planners and group organizers and there are the single event planners.

A single event planner is generally an inexperienced person arranging for an event for the first time. Examples of the single event are weddings, graduation or other gatherings of family or friends. How your hotel sales manager will respond to each of these opportunities is quit different. The only real common factor is that both the professional and the single event planner rely on the Internet to help them make their decisions.

Professional meeting planners utilize their industry contacts and their preferred hotel companies when choosing a destination or a hotel. In addition, they rely heavily on the search engines and specific Internet websites for prospective locations, services and information. Although the brand websites deliver sales leads, they are not focused on promoting your hotel. The brand's online RFP forms are generally generic and are processed through the brand. Also, many of the brand websites limit what photos, maps and other features you can use to promote your services or affiliations with local services. The 3rd party meeting sites also try to bring more business to their participating hotels through online listing and links. These sites are useful, but your success is still dependent on presenting your hotel effectively on your own website.

As important as the meeting planners are for the primary markets like New York City, Orlando and Las Vegas there is a tremendous group and meeting sales opportunity among the single event planners. These opportunities are generally smaller groups and fewer services, but with the right marketing they can be more frequent. These prospects generally rely on the Internet even more than the professionals when choosing a location or a hotel. They will search the Internet using search terms that relate more to their specific type of event or meeting. To capture more of this market segments requires an effective property website with more information relevant to your property than is possible on the brand site or 3rd party sites.

A few of the key elements in capturing both professional and one time event planners are:

o Target your search optimization with key search terms that include the terms meetings, events, weddings, graduation and specific conference names. How is your property website ranked for meeting and group search terms?

o Other search engine that are dedicated to matching up hotels with meeting planners and meeting services are important, such as www.conventionplanit.com

o Provide a professional RFP form on your property website. One that keeps it simple for the shopper yet provides enough information for you to deliver a proposal. If you rely on your brand for group leads you are competing with the brand's other properties that are in your market. Lodging Interactive provides a free www.RFPLink.com for hotel property websites.

o Respond to group requests quickly and more details than requested. More details are essential because you do not know what your competition is providing and you want to cover all of your hotel's benefits. You can see a good example with the Lodging Interactive eProposal Sales System.

o Save time and you save money. Your response does not have to be integrated into your PMS or other management systems in the initial response. When the prospect responds, you can move them to closure and complete a detailed profile, setup the contract and allocate rates, rooms and services. Get the business first.

Whether your meeting space accommodates 10 or 1000 the sales objective is the same! You want to capture the prospect, respond quickly and close at your best possible ROI. To accomplish your objectives, you need good online exposure where your target market is shopping and this requires a proactive meeting based search engine program, listings with 3rd party meeting sites and an online response form on your website. When a meeting shopper comes to your website from the search engines they need to enter your site on a page that relates to their group search term. For example, a search for 'Denver CO wedding hotel' should enter your website on a weddings page not the home page.

Lodging Interactive is working with hotel sales managers every day and we see the strengths and weaknesses from both the shopper and the hotel's perspective. We work to provide Internet services and tools to enable all hotels to compete and win group business at a reasonable cost.