I'm thinking about doing a room block for my event. Do you recommend that?
Should I do a room block?
If your event is being held at a hotel, often you are not given a choice on whether or not to secure a block of rooms.
Solutionz provides the event attendee choice and flexibility.
Are you still spending time pre-arranging rooms so that your attendees will get the best rate at your event? Warning: this could just be the biggest fallacy in event management.
For decades, a practice known as blocking hotel rooms has been the way that event and meeting planners have arranged rooms for their event. The premise is that event attendees need your help to find the best rate and to ensure that there are rooms available for them to attend your event.
But guess what? There is a better mousetrap.
MY STORY
The event was at the Marriott on Times Square. I felt cheated when I found out that a colleague had gotten their room online for $75 cheaper than I had paid. Since it was a 3-day conference, the savings was significant, especially since I am an entrepreneur and was paying my own way.
The Smart Events tool allows you to not only provide a tool for ALL attendees, whether they can afford your event selected hotel or not. But on top of that, we donate 10% to your charity of choice AND we pay you a 10% royalty on all bookings made using the tool.
REAL LIFE CASE STUDY
My company recently worked with a major event that negotiated blocks at three downtown hotels for their annual events. They had a spring event and a fall event each year.
We got in touch with them literally weeks before their big fall event, when we noticed that their room blocks were closed out. We had contracted with them to put our smart trip tool on their website so that guests that wanted to attend the event wouldn’t think that it was sold out, just because the preferred hotels were full.
We were grateful for the business and got a lot of insights about the booking behaviors of those attending one of the crazy “con” events. Then, the wildest thing happened. The day after their fall event, people who had booked rooms on our smart trip tool for that event started using that tool right away to book the spring event, before we even had a chance to customize the dates or change the name of the event!
This client has more than 50,000 attendees at their spring event. Based on an industry average of 17% needing (or wanting) a hotel room, that should translate into 8,500 or more that need or want hotel rooms.
I can tell you with great certainty that they hadn’t blocked anywhere near that number of rooms. But they were sold on the blocked room approach, even though we suspected that they didn’t have any sure way of measuring the actual demand.
We were fortunate to be able to keep our smart trip tool on their page until they formalized their room blocks for the spring event (three months later). And rather than getting bookings for just the three hotels that they had block deals with, we had bookings with 12 other properties. We were able to share with them not only the demand, but the average daily room rates and the lengths of stay, plus the advanced booking window for the event.
GUESSING GAME - TOO MANY OR NOT ENOUGH ROOMS?
For their fall event, our client expected over 120,000 attendees. They had arranged several thousand rooms with five hotels for their fall event. While that sounds like a lot, it didn't begin to cover both the "needed" and "wanted" rooms.
They were even able to report back to the city that they had done their part of contributing to the local economy. But guess what, the impact wasn't anywhere near as much as it could have been.
Think about your last few events and whether you were in the too few or too many category or whether you got it “just right”. We suggest using an average of 17% of your attendees as the magic number.