April 2011 - The Black Hole of the Conference Market in the UK?

As soon as the Royal wedding was announced, the sound of holiday forms being filled in grew to a cacophony in every office across the land, as the realisation that with 2 bank holidays, Easter, and the Royal Wedding, by taking the correct 3 days off, these magically transform into 11 days off work. So for 2011, this has created an interesting phenomenon. While Easter always lowers business levels in London (April this year was the worst performing month by quite a distance, except for August), this combination of Bank Holidays and Easter, has given Conference planners, and the Venues themselves a bit of a headache when it comes to pricing, and forecasting for the month. The flipside of this is that March and May are looking like they could be pretty healthy as companies push their corporate events and meetings into these months to make sure they can maximise attendance. With the late announcement of the Royal Wedding (ie most of the pricing, strategy and budgets where already set for next year), will Venues in the UK go back and re-do their business plans and pricing for q1 and q2 2011? I think there may be a good opportunity to maximise revenue in March and May, as conference demand will most likely shift from April. Are you going to take advantage of this in 2011?

While I am on the subject of Bank Holidays - the movement of Easter every year almost always causes issues with forecasting for Hotels across all parts of their business - Will it fall in a "good" way or a "bad" way this year? Will business continue or grind to a halt as the slew of Bank Holidays takes hold? there is always a whiff of uncertainty around the planning of this part of the year.  For hoteliers and revenue management professionals in particular, putting Easter in a the same spot every year would provide a welcome respite from the uncertainty about that time of year, and enable stronger planning. This is pie in the sky thinking though - Easter will always move back and forth through March and April.

  Have any of your major conferences/events decided to change their dates as a result of the Royal Wedding? Will the royal Wedding provide a boost for wedding business as couples look to get married on the same day as the Royal Couple?  Is April the month to really try and get the business in from overseas where easter is not a big factor - for example the Russian market? Time to dust off the crystal ball once again!

An Existential Post - What does The Conference Bench Data actually mean, and how can I improve my RevPAS?

The really simple answer with regards to this is that you can see when you are gaining or falling behind  the market and against your direct competitor set – Simple!

Then these questions usually follow:

How can I use it to make strategic decisions about my business?

What can I get from your metrics that will tell me if I am yielding and pricing correctly?

We get asked these questions a lot here at The Conference Bench, so I thought I would post a few of the stock answers we give to our clients to help them interpret their data. I can see a lot in our clients data, and it nearly always provokes some interesting questions from me as an outsider. But the real key to using the data from The Conference  Bench, is to use it in conjunction with all of your internal measures, and data tracking.

One of the first questions I always ask is “have you been tracking your turndowns?” While this is a fairly basic part of life in a Conference & Events office (see my other post “The Importance of Turndowns”), some hotels and venues are still not doing this. A big piece of advice we give to hotels on a regular basis is the following:  When you turndown/lose a big piece of conference business worth a lot of revenue, and your turndown reason is “lost to main comp set – hotel X” the key thing to do here is to check the compset report over the period when that booking was supposed to be happening. Was the comp set affected?  Did the revenue increase by a big % compared to the same week last year?  And also – has that booking appeared on the readerboard of our comp set in the hotel we lost it to (it is always funny in meetings asking the “do you read your competitions reader board?” question; most always admit it sheepishly in the end!)?  From this you can see whether or not that booking was really worth turning down or losing on rate, especially if you know your competition in enough detail.

The other question we get a lot is “Are we Pricing correctly, and can we yield our space a bit more? Can you give us some guidance on our rates?” –

Looking at Conference Bench data does not give instant feedback on the rates being given as we collect total revenue. So as a rule of thumb, we always focus on the RevPAS and % share of revenue in the market/comp set to begin with before going a bit deeper with the other metrics.  The first thing to look at with regards to pricing is the Daily Averages – Which days of the week are you stronger and which are weaker?  Are you dynamically pricing the weaker days of the week?  Or perhaps even looking at ways to target poor corporate days such as Friday with Social business – Weddings etc? More often than not, we see great variation on the day of week performance, where a lot of venues are not dynamically pricing or there is less focus on the weaker shoulder days.  The key to finding out if you are yielding is to first check the occupancy against the comp set and market – if your venue is on a level par in occupancy with the comp set or market, then it is time to Check the RevPOS and RevPD data. If you are ahead on these two it shows you are yielding well in the market place. If however you are low on occupancy in comparison to the comp set, your RevPOS and potentially the RevPD could be artificially inflated so it is very important to look at these when your occupancy is on the level with the comp set. 

 Only the other day I was doing some analysis on one of our stronger hotels in the market – they are well ahead in Occupancy – 50% on some  days. I would normally expect their RevPOS and RevPD to be lower than the comp set (ie you are dividing the revenue by more square metres and delegates when you are busier than the market), but this hotel has such strong performance and good process in place that they still outperform the market in RevPOS and RevPD significantly. So they are therefore yielding strongly in the market.

With regards to the % share of the revenue, we find that a lot of our top performing hotels are regularly taking more than their fair share of revenue. Ie one of our top performing hotels has only 4% of the space in the market, but is regularly taking 8 – 12% of the total revenue. Outperforming your share is a very good measure of success in the meetings market. There is an exception to this – if your hotel has a very large square meter value – very Large venues (4000 sq meter and upwards) can still perform very well, but typically do not match their share of the space in revenue terms. In these cases it is sometimes more worthwhile comparing their own RevPOS performance to the RevPAS performance of the comp set or market as it gives a fairer comparison.

Also – this question comes up quite a lot: “how can we tell when the larger meeting rooms are occupied in the comp set from your data? “ We track Occupancy in Square meters, and also in Occupancy of Meeting Rooms. So as an example – if you have 10 meeting rooms and 2 are occupied, your occupancy of meeting rooms will stand at 20%. If these two rooms happen to be your Ballroom, and the rest of your rooms are smaller – your occupancy of Square meters is likely to be around the 50% mark depending on the rest of your space. so when looking at the compset and market data, it is fairly obvious when the bigger rooms are occupied. depending on the market, (some markets have more ballroom space than others) a difference of around 20 - 30 percentage points between the occupancy of Meeting rooms, and the Occupancy of Square Meters. 

Hopefully the above has given a little insight into how we can help you get some better results in your conference space by using The Conference Bench data proactively. These are just a few of the ways we help venues. Please get in touch if you would like to know more!