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HOTELS webinar: Managing meetings, events

HOTELS gathered three industry sales leaders for a webinar on April 20 to talk about how they’re managing group business through the pandemic and tactics they are employing to generate revenue today and going forward. 

Sponsored by Oracle Hospitality, more than 500 readers of HOTELS and hotelsmag.com signed up for the virtual event entitled, “Driving revenue in the crucial meetings and event space.” 

Moderated by HOTELS Editor in Chief Jeff Weinstein, panelists included Kelly Knowlen, executive director of sales engagement and special events at Hilton; Brandi Ronk, director, Sales, Groups & Meetings at Sol Group Corp., which represents the global portfolio of Melia Hotels International; and Dan Surette, chief sales officer at Omni Hotels & Resorts. 

Over the next three days, HOTELS will share the highlights from the hour-long conversation. Here is Part 1: 

HOTELS: Describe the current state of group business. 

Brandi Ronk: Around this time last year, we saw lead production drop to 90% below 2019 levels. Today, our clients are starting to feel more comfortable planning future events, and as of last week, I’m happy to report that we saw lead production in line with April 2019. 

Kelly Knowlen: One trend that we’re going to continue to see is a need for hybrid events. Our planners are telling us that even when they get back to in-person events, the they’re still going to have this need for a digital component… 

We’ve offered a suite of solutions – everything from a playbook with resources to help them execute a hybrid event, to multi-site agreements, and identifying our hybrid-ready hotels to help them check that box. We have more than 2,700 hotels that have been identified as hybrid-ready. 

Dan Surette: Initially, we were really talking about force majeure and cancellation clauses. We weren’t selling and talking about our products as we were in a spin that really put us in a tough spot… Our resort portfolio and our getaway destinations really helped us. Leisure really carried us through. And what also carried us through, which was a little bit of a surprise in the beginning, were all the youth sports and sports in general. 

We’ve seen regional corporate, drive market meetings. But the large convention business has dried up and it’s going to be difficult for a while. For those convention markets, it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens with attendees. While we’re not seeing as many cancel, how big are those meetings really going to be? 

We actually just beat our April lead volume, seeing corporate uptick, which is really good for everybody. The rest of this year is going to be really interesting with the vaccinations and restrictions lessening, but we’re really optimistic. I’m excited about where we’re going. 

H: What does the next 6 months look like? 

Surette: We’re seeing a really nice surge of small, short-term business. It may be 20, 50, 75 rooms, but there’s a lot of it for the next 90 days. We’re doing quarterly budgets, and we’re going to walk into May with our budget on the books. That’s how quick and short-term it has been.

Then there’s a little bit of a gap in the summer, and we’re seeing nice business picking up in the fall… I think Q4 is going to be a nice quarter for all of us. And then, hopefully, we’ll get back to booking further out. 

Knowlen: We’ve really been focused on small groups because that’s what we’re seeing. But the good news is that the larger groups are not canceling – they’re rescheduling. Another positive sign is our business travel accounts are extending rate. 

Ronk: Melia had the foresight early on in this pandemic to create a LinkedIn group page, where we were able to invite our customers to be members. It has allowed us to engage with our customers on creative and enlightening virtual events with relevant speakers, and keeping them up to date on what was new in our portfolio. Then, on Zoom and Teams, we were having one-on-one quarterly updates because we couldn’t go to client’s offices or their destinations. We were really able to find out what they needed. 

H: What tactics are helping drive business that is coming back? 

Surette: As things started to loosen up, it was how do we tell customers what we’re doing with an Omni Safe & Clean, and what protocols we have. We did a lot of virtual events, and since our customers were locked up, we went out to see them. We rented an RV, wrapped it with Omni, and we drove around the country hitting 15 sites. We’re going to do the West Coast this fall. As time went on, we increased our virtual selling and our hybrid content… 

There are some trade shows and industry events later this year that maybe we’ll all get out to. And little by little, we’re going to spend more time with our customers and our teams. We’re adding back sellers, too. We will bring people back into the fold and redeploying them into the market. It’s going to be an evolution. We’re going to change the tires as the car’s going down the road for the rest of this year. 

H: What technological advances and innovations are driving business? 

Knowlen: We looked at the portfolio to identify who was hybrid-ready. That was the big, big piece of work for us to help our customers really understand what hotels had the right bandwidth and infrastructure to host small hybrid events. 

We’re seeing small groups as the first to come back. So, to be able to have a group in person and to be able to live stream, or have a virtual component to reach more folks, and to know that the hotels that they were considering had available bandwidth and infrastructure was first. 

We also launched this hybrid chapter with five different case studies, an IT checklist, hybrid glossary of terms. It’s really providing those resources for the planners, so when they do start to plan in-person events with this digital component, they understand the questions they should be asking. 

We even have some of our hotels that have built presentation studios. The customers can go in and either do pre-recording of their content, or they can do live streaming from these presentation stages.

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