A new product from Starcite shows some promise in this area:

The StarCite Group Rate Advisor equips meeting planners and meeting suppliers with forward-looking hotel rate forecasts using meeting planning data from RFPs flowing through its meetings platform.

Using data collected from StarCite’s marketplace, StarCite can produce reports for any city or geographical region, that will provide sleeping room rate ranges and trends as far as twelve months in advance. The StarCite tool will also provide in-depth benchmarking information derived from years’ worth of historical booking data from the StarCite marketplace.

More at Starcite

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According to a report in Business Travel Europe, the tool covering meetings planning, venue sourcing, attendee management and multi-spend reporting was launched at Imex Frankfurt this week. And it seems all about Return on Investment (ROI) which is now a frequent theme in the group business sector.

Christer Nordlund, HRG’s director events and meetings management, says “The ROI concept is being used to an increasing extent for this industry and the trend is clear: multinational companies are taking charge and directing processes towards increased cost and quality control.”

With procurement departments having more of a say, better sales management and tracking tools will have an increasing role to play in how meeting planners buy.

What does this mean for hotels? Ample demonstration of  value and values adds in proposals will make a bigger difference in the future.

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Check out Swissotel’s new website which they launched last month - very smart and stylish with the only hitch being the loading times on some pages.

The site also includes a good online group RFP tool using Starcite at the back end.

Here is what they say about the RFP tool

”Unlike a conventional Request for Proposal (RFP), our Online RFP helps you build a complete meeting request by walking you through each step. You can fill in as much or as little information as you want. Your profile, as well as each RFP, is automatically saved and can be copied, forwarded or modified for future meetings, reducing data entry errors and saving time.This Online RFP is fully integrated into a Hotel & Facility Search Directory. Simply select the facilities you are considering, create the RFP and submit the request instantly to each of the hotels you have selected.”

More at http://swissotel.plansoft.com/global/rfp/index.asp

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Websites like Starcite will play an important role as a group channel for some time to come. And so will some of the software solutions that support them in improving sales management. 

StarCite is a leader in this market and offers on demand global meeting solutions that help hotels market, get and manage leads and book more revenue. StarCite’s Marketing Programs help suppliers gain a competitive edge showcasing their properties against thousands of others. Once you get the leads, StarCite’s innovative Response technologies help respond fast and track the progress of leads. www.starcite.com
 
Some other event websites include
www.worldmeetings.com
www.conventionplanit.com
www.sitevisit.com

When it comes to meetings and events, and supporting sales operations effeciency, here are two leading players - one is PASSKEY which is big in the US but not widely used in the European markets - they are a provider of web-based applications that automate the group housing management and reservation processing for the meetings and convention industry. www.passkey.com
 
And when it involves saving double entry for group booking and reservations teams, then a major player is MEETINGBROKER (part of Newmarket International). It is a web-based information service that distributes and manages leads from multiple business channels (example: starcite, company websites). MeetingBroker receives requests for proposals (RFPs) sent by meeting planners and provides a suite of online tools to more quickly assign, respond to, and analyze these leads. It allows the leads to be created directly in the sales and catering system used by hotels provided they are interfaced or if they use Delphi Sales & Catering.  
www.meetingbroker.com