You’ve Put It Off Long Enough. Meeting Technology Needs To Be A Part Of Your Meeting Planning Process in 2015!

Meeting technology has evolved dramatically over the past 3 – 5 years. There are apps and solutions that help you get almost every aspect of your meeting planning process completed faster and more accurately than ever before. From RFP technology, to attendee registration, to onsite event apps and surveys; whatever the task, there’s a technology to handle it.

This article will focus on what we believe is the most important technology to adopt; sourcing and eRFP technology. After all, everything else happens after the hotel is selected.

Specifically, we’re going to talk about ASAP’s solution that has many time and money-saving benefits:

• eRFP Genie: Create your meeting request in just a few minutes, including your meeting agenda. • Robust and ad-free hotel search capabilities:
• Find hotels all over the world. Narrow your search results using custom filters like hotel quality, meeting room size, hotel size, distance from the airport, etc.
• Interactive hotel bid summary: View multiple hotels and offers in one click. Print, export a link, or download to a spreadsheet for further customization.
• Free to use for ASAP members.

Connect With Hotels

Once you have narrowed your list of hotels that can offer availability and rates within your budget, it’s time for you to begin negotiations with the sales manager. This is where you need to spend your valuable time–negotiating the offered rate, food and beverage minimums, room rental, etc. You may choose to arrange a site visit as well, where you may build strong relationships with hotels.

Request a Few Hotel Concessions

Concessions are another vital component to hotel negotiations. If you’re not familiar with this term, concessions are the “special deals” that you would like the hotel to include in their final proposal, either at a discount or sometimes at no charge at all. Those deals may include waiving parking fees or WiFi charges, providing suite upgrades, discounting F&B, offering VIP amenities, and more. Always request concessions that will make a difference in your hotel meeting experience and improve your bottom line at the same time. But how do you ask hotels for these specific deals? First, determine which concessions are most important to your meeting, listing your preferred requests in order of priority.

ASAP’s RFP solution, powered by Zentila

As a member of ASAP, you have FREE access to the most intuitive RFP technology in the meetings industry. It’s super easy to use, and you’ll receive hotel proposals with great offers, usually the same business day. It’s not just great technology - along the way, you can get helpful advice from the experts at Zentila. Get started >>

Regardless of the method you use to submit your meeting requests, there are a number of things you can do to generate great proposals from hotels. We outline these tips in our meeting planner guide: 8 Secrets to Great Hotel Meeting Requests. These 8 simple tips can help you to improve hotel response time, get complete bids, and secure great deals from hotels every time.

Download our free guide and you'll learn to:

• Increase your chances of getting complete bids on the first try
• Improve your communications to hotels
• Book your meeting with the hotel that you really want! Learn more.