The Three Attributes Hotels Must Possess to Attract More Events
The global event industry was valued at approximately $890 billion (USD) in 2020 and is projected to reach more than $2 trillion (USD) by 2028.
Event revenue can total as much as 65% of a property's sales, and event guests pay as much as 17.5% more on average than leisure guests.
This dramatic increase in demand and spending represents a significant potential revenue source for properties. Venues that focus on delivering world-class meetings, banquets, conventions, and exhibitions and that cater to the unique needs of event hosts and participants will significantly benefit from their increasing demand.
While current events range from in-person to hybrid or fully remote, in-person events are seeing the highest jump. In 2023, nearly two-thirds of corporate events in North America will be held in person, with 53% in Europe, 49% in Latin America, and 37% in Asia Pacific. These rates continue to rise and require planners and hotel event venues to customize offerings to these attendees and guests – whether in person, virtual, or hybrid.
While event attendance is up this year, planners face challenges including lower budgets, shorter planning time, and the need to attract new attendees as well as attract those they lost during the pandemic. Hotels that work in true partnership with event planners and provide innovative and intuitive software solutions tailored specifically for sales, catering, and event management can ensure a successful event and satisfied attendees. Properties must conduct an honest assessment of their ability to cater to banquets, meetings, and events, and ensure they possess three key attributes if they want to attract business, increase revenue, and book repeat business.
Attribute 1 - Flexibility
With the pressure placed on understaffed planning teams, a property's ability to be flexible is an essential component to making their jobs easier. While many events across the globe are back to being held in person, planners today are catering to client requirements by offering hybrid and multi-hub hybrid options for attendees to participate in events. As individual events evolve, the attendees switching between attending online and in-person can change, adding to the headache of planners. Properties that are flexible and can change with the event at a moment's notice help ease stress on planners and position themselves as planner-friendly through word-of-mouth referrals.
This means providing powerful solutions that help planning staff pivot with changing needs. Event management systems that integrate with existing property management systems provide hotel staff access to real-time information and detailed dashboards that present real-time insights and highlight changes occurring as the event evolves. With the right solution, fluctuation in attendance and room blocks are updated in real-time, communicated through automatic alerts, and accessible on the mobile device of the attendee's choice. Additionally, host properties can analyze booking pace and increase event revenue with yield management insights for group sales, conferences, and banquets. This helps properties maximize revenue for each event.
After the event has commenced, staff can flex to accommodate a planner's evolving budget. Food costs and menus, and the catering team can execute last-minute changes by viewing inventory in real time. Most importantly, intuitive task planning and scheduling help free up sales, catering, event teams, and event planners so they can focus on optimizing the experiences of attendees, hosts, sponsors, and guests.
While event attendance is up this year, planners face challenges including lower budgets, shorter planning time, and the need to attract new attendees as well as attract those they lost during the pandemic. Hotels that work in true partnership with event planners and provide innovative and intuitive software solutions tailored specifically for sales, catering, and event management can ensure a successful event and satisfied attendees. Properties must conduct an honest assessment of their ability to cater to banquets, meetings, and events, and ensure they possess three key attributes if they want to attract business, increase revenue, and book repeat business.
Attribute 2 - Scalability
Many sales and event management systems available today have evolved to provide powerful tools for hotels, conference centers, and resorts of all sizes. They promote seamless collaboration and sharing of critical event data between sales, conference, and banquet teams, ensuring efficiency, accuracy, and improved productivity that contribute to a successful event and the hotel's bottom line.
As noted in a recent EHL Insights article, Implementing tailor-made [event] services into a hotel infrastructure is a way of securing additional long-term valuable growth. The latest Convention Industry Council report claimed that 85% of meetings in the U.S. are conducted at venues with lodging, generating more than 275 million room nights annually...In brief, hotel meetings and corporate events are great ways to boost revenue and secure those extra bookings. Lastly, developing [event] services is the perfect opportunity to enhance a hotel's reputation and profile, besides its profitability.
These solutions allow group sales team members to seamlessly manage multiple meeting room bookings for large, multi-day events. Planners have the tools to view all attendees or guests as well as their common profile and manage room blocks of varying sizes. Group services and functions can be accessed and managed from a single screen where all attendee and event data is consolidated into an easy-to-read format with access to real-time insights. Hotels with robust sales, catering, and events solutions can manage multiple events of different sizes and can easily accommodate planners' needs and attendees' requests in real time.
Attribute 3 - The Ability to Personalize
With most events having an in-person component this year, hotels and planners must take advantage of the opportunity to connect with in-person attendees and keep them engaged with the event's host and the property while on-site as well as after they return home. This is especially critical in the post-pandemic world of hospitality.
By accessing folio management tools and information from the event dashboard and guest profiles, empowered staff members can identify and create lasting, authentic hospitality moments above and beyond typical service protocols to help planners offer truly personalized VIP experiences to attendees. These staff members are building loyalty and creating champions for their brand in the form of future return guests while building long-term relationships with event planners, who will more freely share their elevated experience with others online or via social media. This creates a brand halo effect for the property and elevates the planner's reputation in the process.
Hotels that integrate their sales and event management system with a robust, direct channel booking solution, also provide guests with access to book additional services, activities, and amenities to take an active role in further personalizing their event experience. Through these solutions, properties are optimizing the staff's limited resources by allowing the guests to help customize their experience through self-service. In turn, this level of customization helps improve staff efficiency and productivity.
Post-event, staff can help planners engage with attendees through an integrated digital marketing platform that continues to nurture the relationship long after these guests leave the property. As a value-added service for planners, staff can send out an email with a survey to help gather feedback on the event, the property's service, and amenities. This real-time feedback helps the property better work with event planners to address issues with the event's execution while at the same time replicating those critical details that drive successes and identify areas to enhance attendee experiences at future events.
The Importance of Making an Event Planner's Job Easier
Today, 75% of event planners report they have much shorter lead times to plan events. Hotel staff can make planners' jobs easier by using the property's solutions powered by real-time insights to quickly manage room booking and catering. Plus, with a dynamic booking solution, properties can provide attendees with a solution that moves them seamlessly through the reservation process, offering access to room upgrades, real-time availability, and rates – without taking up the planner's time.
Contracts and all company, group, and attendee information can be managed in the hotel's database for easy access by the group manager. Additionally, by integrating sales and catering or meeting and event planning solutions with the property's existing point-of-sale (POS) system, catering teams can provide menus plus real-time pricing and availability. Many tasks are automated, saving planners critical time and optimizing operational efficiency to support an ever-increasing number of in-person events.
With easy access to online hotel information and reviews, planners are prioritizing hotels with effective meeting and event technology for their events. Properties with the right solutions installed make the jobs of planners easier and provide them more time to focus on their clients hosting the events and their attendees. With more companies offering remote work, in-person corporate events have taken on a new importance and burden to make each a lasting, truly memorable experience. Planners are putting on more events to help compensate for a dispersed workforce and there is increased pressure on planners to organize a flawless and memorable event, creating repeat customers and increased referrals.
As Drew Crawley, Chief Commercial Officer, American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) added, With teams more dispersed and working remotely, organizations have a greater understanding of how important it is to bring people together – to drive creativity and motivation, to recognize and reward, to attract and retain the best talent. We're seeing this in the way our own M&E (meetings and events) business has led the recovery: while our travel transactions have been strong – surging 50 percentage points against 2019 levels in just five months during the first half of 2022 – we find in this report (2023 Global Meetings and Events Forecast ) that M&E demand has been even stronger, at times topping 2019.
If the planner has time to focus on their clients as hosts and their attendees, while property staff empowered by dynamic systems can help manage the back-end of events, the probability of success increases dramatically. The hotels and venues using software solutions that fully support meetings and events are essential to helping planners create exceptional experiences, thus benefiting the organizations involved in the event, especially the planner, and the hotel property itself in the form of glowing reviews, increased margins, and return bookings. Building lasting loyalty from event planners is critical to long-term success for everyone.
Reprinted from the Hotel Business Review with permission from www.HotelExecutive.com.
About Agilysys
Agilysys exclusively delivers state-of-the-art software solutions and services that help organizations achieve High Return Hospitality™ by maximizing Return on Experience (ROE) through interactions that make "personal" profitable. Customers around the world use Agilysys Property Management Systems (PMS), Point-of-Sale (POS) solutions, Food & Beverage Inventory and Procurement (I&P) systems and accompanying hospitality ecosystem solutions to consistently delight guests, retain staff and grow margins. The Agilysys 100% hospitality customer base includes branded and independent hotels; multi-amenity resorts; casinos; property, hotel and resort management companies; cruise lines; corporate dining providers; higher education campus dining providers; food service management companies; hospitals; lifestyle communities; senior living facilities; stadiums; and theme parks. www.agilysys.com
