What Hoteliers Need From Event Professionals

In talking with a variety of hoteliers, I found that the overriding concern is establishing a clear, concise, and coherent mode of communication with the event planner.

Event planners have a lot on their plate that needs to get sorted and that information needs to be transmitted to the hotelier, which is why closing a deal is only the start of the race. Granted the race is more akin to a marathon than a sprint. Here’s where the process is often times broken, followed by a suggestion for how to fix it:

Real Time Communication

More often than not the mode of communication is through emails, and in the best cases those communiques are logged into a CRM like Salesforce.com or JuggernautCRM. Unfortunately the case where those emails are properly logged is not as common as expected and often key people are left off email threads. This leaves serious accountability gaps since you can’t hold someone accountable for something they were never made aware about their accountability.

The Muffin Example

As well, for example, when the planner finds out the muffins are not in room B54 at 6am, s/he emails the facility manager, who, if he’s tending to his emails at that time, will forward the email to the caterer. This linear flow of communication, if it happens, leads to a slowdown in execution, resulting in frustration and poor attendee experiences.

Event Estimates & Quantities

Hoteliers need to know how many people will be attending the event. Event planners base their current estimates on previous year’s events, however planners who are new to the event process or companies that are new to events, can only spitball attendee estimates at best. Compounding this issue is that hoteliers need to know not only raw attendee numbers as well as the flow of the event; will there be multiple concurrent sessions, breakouts, room requirements etc… The sooner a hotelier can get even raw attendee projections from the event planner, the better, however event planners don’t want to over commit and be held to higher room requirement or underestimate and potentially lose space. Only when the event planner completes the agenda are they ready to pass on their better guess at attendee projections to the hotelier.

This downside of this is that it puts hoteliers into a time crunch since by the time they get close to accurate data the event is bearing down on them like a freight train. One of the unintended consequence of this is that hoteliers are often left with open rooms due to last minute event planner cancellations or low registrations.

With room bookings comes facility requirements. More important than how many muffins are needed to be ordered is how many chairs, desks, set-up (eg round table vs. classroom), electrical requirements, wifi, etc…are required to give the attendees the best experience. The overarching confounding issue here is the question - who is responsible for communicating with the contractor? Again this information is typically poorly communicated among the event planner, the hotelier, and contractor.

Event Documentation

Not that all the issues working with event planners were covered, but the final issue I’ll bring up here is the transmission and storage of shared documents. While DropBox and Google are great they have their limitations when it comes to version control, file sizes, and ensuring that everyone has the appropriate permissions to read, write, upload, or download the documents.

Keys to Success

In summary, logistics & workflow between multiple groups can be cumbersome even with the most well meaning individuals, making seamless communication, transparency and real-time data key. This is why event planners and hoteliers would benefit from using a shared event planning and management platform, capable of integrating with any additional 3rd party tools either party might be using.

Getting everyone on the same page can definitely be a challenge, but once a common system and process are in place it’ll save you time, speed up damage control and get the muffins where they need to be on time - leaving no attendee with an empty stomach.