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!