It’s been said that while technology often solves problems, it also creates new ones.
Never before has that statement been more applicable than it is to electronic Request for Proposals. Basically, these are RFPs sent through online platforms by which meeting planners can submit requests to numerous properties—within a destination and/or across several locales—at one time and with the single press of a button, without planners having to re-produce paperwork numerous times over.
At first mention, one might think such systems would be a godsend for meeting planners, as well as hoteliers, as they can get down to brass tacks quickly. Unfortunately, they’ve been largely the opposite.
Hoteliers are drowning in a sea of paperwork because many meeting planners are sending out inquiries to tons of properties. Worse, while the number of these eRFPs has increased exponentially, the amount of booked business yielded from those inquiries has dropped dramatically, according to industry watchers.
Further, some planners end up frustrated by this process because they don’t get speedy responses or they never hear back at all as their hotel sales counterparts scramble to respond to everyone.
“It’s a big problem because it’s a lot easier to compile information for RFPs and send it now, and the hotels are being bombarded,” says Dave Scypinski, senior vice president at third-party meeting sourcing firm Conference Direct and a former top sales executive at both Hilton Hotels & Resorts and Starwood Hotels & Resorts.
“The big box hotels are trying to catch as many of the fastballs coming at them as possible,” he continues. “It’s like that episode of I Love Lucy when she’s working at the chocolate factory and can’t keep up with the conveyor belt.”
Mike Dominguez, vice president of global sales at Loews Hotels, adds, “The bandwidth of meeting professionals using those services really has expanded. They have the ability to cast a wide net now.”
But that ability may be costing salespeople their jobs, contends industry analyst Dave Lutz, managing director at Velvet Chainsaw Consulting.
“People who’ve been in the industry for 25 years are losing their jobs because more RFPs are coming into their offices and their close rates aren’t what they were,” he says. “I’m sure we can find 50 to 100 people this has happened to in the last 18 months, and I think this is going to grow.”
Dominguez suggests a simple fix for the problem to meeting planners: send out fewer RFPs.
“If you have to look at 16 hotels, I think that’s fine but if you look at four different destinations and multiple properties within each one, that’s where maybe the process needs to be more streamlined,” he says.
Agreed Mark Theis, director of group sales, North America at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, “What needs to happen is better, more targeted searches for customers, versus this spray and pray method. When that happens, it goes to the bottom of the pile because it’s not a viable lead.”
But hoteliers and eRFP providers aren’t looking only to lay blame at planners’ feet.
“It’s no one’s fault, it’s just that we’re dealing with a new way of processing leads,” says Dominguez. “We’ve all been trained to get things on demand, so customers expect that. At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility as a hotelier to figure it out. Either we become more efficient in this channel—which is just the cost of doing business—or we lose the opportunities that could come from those leads.”
One hotel company is tackling this responsibility head on. Hyatt Hotels and Resorts by year-end plans to begin issuing automated responses to eRFPs, according to Senior Vice President of Sales Jack Horne. Horne says the tool, Quick Book, will self-populate most meetings RFP questions and provide rates, food and beverage costs and meeting room rental information without human intervention.
While this may seem to commoditize the process, Horne emphasizes this will only be useful in getting the ball rolling in generating a proposal and that there will still be interaction between the customer and the hotel.
“Some RFPs have in excess of 100 questions, we may only be able to auto-populate 65 questions, but that will be a big time-saver,” he says. “My goal is never to reduce that relationship [between the hotel and a meeting planner] though, this is just step one of the process.”
Even the technology providers see the value of personal connections when it comes to working with RFPs, notes George Shagoury, senior director of sales at Cvent.
“Fundamentally this is still the hospitality industry and in no way should eRFPs remove communication and the human element from the sourcing process” he says.
In fact, Cvent and other similar companies have facilitated many discussions with hotels and suppliers in recent months to find ways to address this problem.
“Many discussions are taking place around the industry on this, it’s the new attrition,” notes Scypinski.
As a result, Cvent is planning to make several changes to its technology this year, Shagoury says.
“This includes time-saving features like allowing hoteliers to easily opt out of questions that don’t make sense. For example, if there’s a question regarding the cost of valet parking for a hotel that doesn’t have valet, this will eliminate the need to answer that,” he notes. “We also will make it simpler for hotels to enter and copy rates, dates and meeting room information.”
But ultimately, the hotels, meeting buyers and the technology firms all need to work together to create solutions, Shagoury adds.
“I don’t think any one side can solve it on their own,” he says. “The industry needs to come together and create standards.”
