Inside The Conference Bench

I thought it might be a good idea give you an insight into something we are working on here at The Conference Bench.

One of the next pieces of development we are going to do is the incorporation of Rooms attached to conference, and/or group rooms. The idea of this to start with is to show exactly how much money your conference space is generating for the business - in both Food, Beverage & Room Hire, and the group bedroom revenue that is attached to these bookings. The second outcome of collecting this data is that we will very quickly be able to show group trend for a city, in average group rate, and average group occupancy, and this is the bit that really excites me. What is the average group bedroom rate across all of our markets? How different is the rate between London, Dubai, and Moscow?  When is the peak group room rate achieved in Frankfurt? During Imex?  November or December in London? With the transient business shrinking, and group ceiling's at an all time high will this be shown in the year to year reports?  I am very excited about seeing this in conjunction with our existing reports. For those that know me, they see how excited I can get about our reporting!

In terms of the process:  to start with, we ask all of our major client contacts for feedback regarding the next piece of development. We ask them the relevant questions - what is the process for your hotel/group/chain? How are the hotels measured internally? Are the hotels targeted on these figures? How would you like the results to be presented in the reporting?

With every piece of the development we do there is always nearly always a hard decision to be made. In the piece described above, we are torn between the following:

Do we track bedrooms attached to conference only; to give the true value of conference business?
or
Do we track all group bookings over 10 rooms including conference bedroom bookings; to give the "true" group rate & occupancy figures for the markets and comp sets?
or
Do we track both separately and risk having too much input?

Sometimes we are lucky, and the process and practice undertaken by the big groups and chains will dictate the way we decide to go - this is certainly true of our Data Guidelines, which where heavily influenced by Starwood, Hilton, Marriott and IHG. I think we went through 30 versions before coming to the one all of our hotels use today!

One of the key things we always tell our clients, and is absolutely paramount when doing the development is the mantra we have had from the start:

Simple, easy to use input (so all hotels can take part) which is matched with useful, informative output.

We have found that as soon as you make the input too complex, and it is not an easy task for hotels to complete, the hotels soon drop out.

What do you think?  What would you like to see with regards to bedrooms attached to Conference & Events?

While you are on the site, we have a little poll going on on the left hand side of the Blog at the top. Have a look, and see what you think!  Please add your vote! YOUR occupancy measure depends on it!

New Destination - Berlin

We are delighted to announce the full arrival of Berlin as a destination here at The Conference Bench - with 9 hotels participating to begin with, we hope to add more hotels in the coming weeks, and after the summer holiday period is over! Look out for our next data announcement -  Berlin will be included, and it will be very interesting to see how it stacks up in comparison to our other European destinations. Watch this space!

Happy Birthday to US! Year to Year DATA, and a very big Thank YOU!

7 of our London hotels, 7 in Stockholm, and 11 in Dubai had their first Conference Bench Birthday in June.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the hotels that have supported us, given excellent feedback, and most importantly for being essential in getting The Conference Bench up and running.

While June is quiet in both Scandinavia and the Middle East, our 7 London (mostly 5*) properties posted a massive 24.64% increase in revenue over the previous year!  This was driven across the board by occupancy, and from the look of the figures, an increase in the sale of smaller meeting rooms. Occupancy in Square meters was up by 19.83% year to year, and occupancy of meeting rooms up by 25.60% year to year!

Interestingly, even though the revenue was up, the Revenue Per Delegate only rose by 8 pence, showing that although there was more business in the market, hotels have not been able to yield any better than they did last year. It did not get any worse, which is great news in the current climate.

We are very excited about getting to this milestone in our 3 markets - the year to year data should provide a very interesting analysis point in addition to the tools we already have in place.

We are still very keen to get more of this data from hotels - from the look of the way the figures are turning out, it could be very useful indeed. Especially as the coming months - September, October, November and December are the strongest performing months in nearly all of the markets. The data should begin to highlight  whether the conference & events sector is actually coming out of recession, or still suffering.

Keep your eyes peeled for some more Data soon, and drop us a line in the comments or to info@jwbench.com if you have any questions.

(Please click picture to enlarge)
Please find above the total Revenue Per Available Square Meter (RevPAS), by daily average and Revenue Per Delegate (RPD), and detailed Occupancy for the month for our Maturing Destinations. Please leave us a comment if you would like more information.

Do Points really mean Prizes? Or better still, do points mean Conference Revenue?

Hilton Honours, Priority Club, Marriott Rewards, StarPoints, A/CLUB  points, Goldpoints Plus, Voila – just a few of the hotel rewards out there.

This is a subject that has always intrigued us here at The Conference Bench. The above programs work exceptionally well for rooms, rewarding repeat customers for their loyalty to their chosen brand or hotel chain, with points available for every £ or € spent on property. While working for Marriott I recall a great number of Marriott Rewards Millionaires passing through the doors of the Renaissance Chancery Court, with tales of spending upwards of 250 nights a year in Marriott properties ( get a life!!), upgrades, and generally being treated like royalty when in a  Marriott property.  I was also tasked with signing up Marriott Rewards members, as are nearly every front desk staff  member at all of the above hotel chains.

This is obviously a very powerful marketing tool – the numbers are insane– Marriott Rewards members number over 21 million from a cursory scan of google, and the other major chains are probably around the same number or in the case of IHG, 37 million members!!!!!

What we cannot understand is why hotel companies have not been able to harness this great marketing tool to power up their meetings and events revenue. In the UK a lot of the bookings are done by Conference Agents, who by the nature of their agreement with the hotels are not allowed to take points for placing bookings, so for the most part, those bookings can be excluded, although some of them do offer reward points to the guest once they are in the hotel. This “double dipping” always used to irk me somewhat, as not only is the hotel paying commission to the Conference Agent, they are also parting with rewards points for the organiser, even though they had very little say in choosing the property. Part of me thinks that hotels do not want to reward big conference and events business.

 As an example – IHG cap conference and events at 60,000 points per event (3 points per £ spent), and Hilton cap theirs at 100,000 points (1 Hilton Honors point per £ spent) The average points cost of staying in a hotel is  around 25,000 for IHG and 30,000 points for Hilton.    So with Hilton, the absolute maximum you are giving away is 3.5 free nights in a hotel for a £100,000 booking in Honors points?  What kind of a reward is that?!? – ok you can stay in a Hilton category 1 hotel for 7500 points, but something tells me they may not be the best/centrally located properties out there! The same is true of IHG, although a little better.. you only need to spend £20,000 to get three free nights with points!

Bearing in mind the actual cost of these stays that is reimbursed to the property by head office is around $60 US dollars per room per night (according to my anonymous source within IHG), you begin to see my point that they are not too keen on awarding big points for meeting and events!

One of the trends we come across a lot is that meetings are Seasonal and destination led – ie big meetings go from one destination city to the next and therefore demand is very difficult to track accurately. The above is true to an extent, and a good way of harnessing this marketing power for the big groups and chains would be to hook some of these annual/bi annual destination movers with the promise of rewards for loyalty – ie have it in a Hilton Hotel wherever you may be every year/six months, and we will reward you for bringing the business to us. Do it for five years on the trot and on the fifth year we will give every attendee 100,000 points each, and the major buyer 1,000,000!  Surely this would be a sure fire win for the client as well as the hotel chain – a nice booking that is worth a huge amount of revenue that repeats every year, or every six months, (be it in a different hotel or region) and the organiser/buyer is happy as they can build a hotel with all the reward points they have accumulated!  While in theory this is a win win, and seemingly very simple to do, in practice it would require a hell of a lot of cooperation between hotels, and the conference offices of each, as well as between regions, and all the politics that goes with along with that.   This is something that could be done with smaller, repeat training bookings that occur monthly within your hotel, but occasionally go and try the competition – what a lovely way to keep those base bookings that keep the department ticking over month after month with a relatively low cost reward – certainly costs less than agency commission!  Or come to think of it, another way of convincing guests to book directly with you – book with us and get the rewards directly.

Or is it a case of poor education?  From my experience, direct clients were rarely, if ever, told how many reward points they might earn from booking a meeting or event within a hotel! Is this a way to differentiate yourself from the pack?  Offer up the rewards during the booking process to add a little extra spice for the client to book directly. Granted they might ask for points from the other hotels they are getting quotes from, but this would certainly make the proposition a bit more rosy if up against what the client may view as a poorer reward scheme/no reward scheme.

The other question is of oversaturation. Do our clients have a wallet stuffed with every reward point card imaginable?  In this case is there a better alternative that has not been tried before? Yes, we are talking cold, hard, cash! Would it be better to offer the direct customers some lower lever of commission?  Say 3% for booking direct? 

 How are you using the massive marketing muscle of your group or chain that is the reward scheme?  Are you using it proactively?  We may be wide of the mark with the above blog post – if so, put us right in the comments!

Friday Tales – C & B; Conference & Banqueting, or Chaos & Bedlam?

Hotels see all walks of life, and all types of strange behaviour - they seem to be a hotbed of outrageous behaviour, from hotel guests and hotel employees alike! My friends always ask me if Hotel Babylon (the book) is true - I alwasy answer that the reality is that they are worse!

Whereas the rooms division get all sorts of nice surprises from guests on a daily basis, Conference & Banqueting is a place where even more mysterious goings on occur, as I am sure your operations team will attest to! In one year of working in banqueting I witnessed the following crazy situations:

A very expensive wedding for 400 people completed by a solid silver throne worth £20,000 for the couple to sit on during the ceremony. Not only did they have this ornate throne, but they also had a bald eagle and a sparrow hawk in the room to deliver the rings!  I got the shock of my life coming on shift and walking into one of the storerooms to be confronted by the 4 foot bald eagle sitting in its cage on top of a stack of tables!

Xmas Parties – at one big accountancy firms xmas party, I witnessed a behaving extremely inappropriately on a chair in the  middle of the ballroom – I could hardly believe my eyes! It was right at the end of the night, and the room was fairly dark, and they had decided to go for it! What on earth do you do/say in a situation like that?

At another Xmas party – a girl dancing barefoot got a 5 cm piece of glass wedged into the bottom of her foot. She was so drunk she did not even notice, and put bloody footprints all over the dance floor, the carpet, into the lobby and into the restrooms. We eventually called her an ambulance, but she did not want to leave!

An Iranian New Years Eve Party was in full swing with approximately 200 guests in the ballroom.  The music was quite loud, and the party just getting into full swing, when a drunk, jet lagged American guest came stumbling, bleary eyed into the ballroom, and proceeded to jump on the stage, grab the microphone and start spewing obscenities about his lack of sleep in a loud drawling American accent. Safe to say this did not go down too well with the Iranian guests!

At one of the hotels I worked in, the rest rooms were situated on the other side of the lobby to the bar. So when bar patrons where particularly drunk they could not find them, and would often wander into the emergency exit behind the bar – I caught more than 2 people peeing against the wall in this exit!

These are just a few of the crazy things that went on in my hotel life, which I sorely miss. Have you got any tales from the C & B department of your hotel?  Add into the comments below! Anonymously if needs be!