Planners and Suppliers Don’t Understand Each Other When It Comes to RFPs

Mike Ferreira, CEO of Meetings Made Easy, feels that some people think about RFPs the same way they think about shopping online. ”It’s just basic human behavior. You want something, you go to Amazon Prime and it comes to your house pretty quickly. You’re used to getting whatever they want in 24–-48 hours, so why would hotel proposals be any different?”

Ferreira, who spent many years on the hotel sales side of the business at The Bellagio, is a “meetings broker” — a middle man between his event planner clients and hotels. He says this expectation of almost-immediate responses from hotels grew out of the post-Covid period and hasn’t let up since. Compounding the transactional nature of the process is the fact that almost all RFPs now go through Cvent.

“I tell my corporate clients that from the time they send out their RFPs, they have 21-45 days to choose a site, negotiate, and sign a contract. In my opinion, you have to operate in that timeframe today.”

Moving so fast leaves room for error. Hotel salespeople end up with issues like inconsistencies between the room block and meeting space requirements that require them to reach back out for clarification. 

Rushed planners will sometimes copy an old RFP and carry over irrelevant information, or not include as much information as they could, such as meeting history data. In addition to their unrealistic expectations regarding turnaround, hotel salespeople say planners can also hurt their chances of having their RFPs accepted by inflating their room blocks, using vague F&B estimates, or being inflexible about their patterns.

Revenue First

In a recent article in his LinkedIn newsletter, Room Blocks & Reality Checks, Ferreira laid out what he called “the honest truth”: When a hotel sales manager opens your RFP, they’re not reading it the way you think they are. They’re not starting with your mission statement or your agenda, they’re calculating revenue and/or your arrival pattern. 

Food & beverage and meeting space rental matter, but they’re secondary, he wrote. Whether or not a hotel decides if your group is worth prioritizing is all about your room block.

This leaves planners feeling like their hotel counterparts are not taking the time to understand their groups, the mission of the meetings, and the potential for future business that they bring. One planner described himself as “exhausted” by hotels that are not invested in events and simply see them only as revenue and price points.

“I would never  go back to a hotel if the mindset is focused on sleeping rooms. So many hotels miss the mark because their venue isn't accommodating to the type of events we want to do and they could better improve their offerings if they took the time to look at an agenda and use that information to improve and better market what they offer to me.” 

Other planners lament that the meetings industry is no longer a relationship business. But what has really changed is how sellers evaluate potential business.

What Happened?

Hotel salespeople used to be able to bid on an RFP with no checks or balances, as long as they followed certain guidelines. Now, they must rely on business review meetings, which in many hotels are held once a day and include the hotel revenue professional, the director of sales, and the other sales managers. As a team, they evaluate each piece of business based on its revenue potential.

They look at opportunity cost, asking questions such as: What other business might we be turning away? Could transient demand outperform this group? Is this space better used for another group?

“I’ve been in those business review meetings as a hotel salesperson and I feel like a lot of event planners are not aware of how it works,” said Ferreira. “When you send an RFP, the hotel salesperson does not usually have the ability in a majority of situations to openly bid.”

Both sides would benefit from more education on how each other’s jobs work. “Hotel sales is a language that most people are not fluent in,” said Ferreira. There’s a science behind it. Planners need to understand that maybe they’re not bringing in enough guest rooms or spending enough on F&B or asking for too much meeting space.”

Does he think the process will ever ease up, or return to what it used to be based on — relationships? “If I was a betting man — and I lived in Vegas for 20 years — I would say no.”