Using Tech To Regain Group Business

By Larry Mogelonsky | January 13, 2021

Groups and MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) travel will come back. Eventually we will have a workable vaccine and herd immunity to COVID-19 and confidence in free international travel will be restored. But the nature of group bookings will be vastly different, and now is the time to get ready by setting up the right tech to realize some quite lucrative benefits.

Large-scale conventions will be the last segment to return, but smaller meetings and regional events may just be around the corner—think Spring 2021. Not only will using the old paper-and-pen methods give the impression that your hotel isn’t doing its best to protect groups from viral spread, but nowadays you also need automation so as to not overload your lean teams.

As we saw with the past two recoveries after 9/11 and the 2008 recession, hotel teams learned to do more with less and this time hospitality organizations will be especially slow to ramp up hiring in the sales department even as business starts to return. The difference now is that the mandate for contactless guest experiences has also accelerated our adoption of end-to-end digital transaction platforms—no manual credit card authorizations required and no paper records.

Importantly, with the pandemic all but permanently changing many of our habits, your future group customers also won’t want to print forms to sign or even negotiate through an extended period of phone (or videoconferencing) conversations. They’ll want a frictionless bargaining process—virtual tours, detailed spec sheets, electronic contracts and web-based BEOs to fill out, all coordinated as fast as possible by your sales team.

Luckily, using a combination of customer-facing platforms and middleware, hotels can speed this process along with features that can:

• Quickly deliver electronic contract documents that can be signed, time-stamped, version coded or updated on the fly;
• Email or text private payment portals so that no credit card information is shared over the phone or via paper forms, thus reducing the chances of fraud and disputes;
• Configure multiple deposit dates and amounts for BEOs so that groups can split the total over a longer timeframe and across different credit cards;
• Layer in additional fraud prevention via payment portal closures after completion, card-not-present restrictions in the days prior to the guests’ arrival and card entry failure limits to deter brute force attacks;
• Send out automated past due notifications to the group planner as a reminder as well as to the sales manager in order to keep track of trailing accounts receivable;
• Connect approved online payments directly into the appropriate ledger within the PMS to decrease time requirements from the accounting team.

Indeed, in the uncertain times ahead, money will be much tighter for businesses and groups as it has been for the average leisure guest. Contracts will be won by specific properties based on arbitrages of within a couple thousand dollars. This means that the cost savings you attain through labor efficiencies, payment flexibility, better interchange rates or any other inborn advantages can then be passed through in the form of a more competitive price to the prospect.

One other behavioral change that we’ve witnessed from this past summer’s vacation data is the speed with which transient hotel guests are booking. Often-times, travelers reserve a room on the Monday prior to a weekend getaway, spurred on by the continually unpredictable nature of lockdowns and staged reopenings. Groups may follow this pattern, and thus you will need to react almost instantly to incoming inquiries lest the group book somewhere else. This makes technology essential to keep pace with the rapidity of the post-COVID group bargaining process.

In the spring, we all took the necessary steps to make our properties as contactless and safe as possible in order to prepare ourselves for the return of FITs and single corporate guests. Now is the time to review your tech stack again to see how you can enable it to facilitate groups while still minimizing costs.