Do Hotels Check If You Are Registered For Conference

room block

Study stakeholders talk over highlights of the "Room Block of the Hereafter" inquiry.

After event organizers manage to motivate attendees to register for a program, they face up some other — and arguably, more challenging — hurdle: getting them to book a room at i of the hotel backdrop in the official hotel cake. You've got a lot of competition with Trivago offer "the ideal hotel room at the best price," and every major hotelier promoting the benefits of booking direct.

A simple Google search yields plenty of results with user-friendly booking options, and Airbnb's affordable alternative to the traditional guest experience continues to buzz in the minds of budget-conscious registrants. With this mile-long list of options, how many attendees are using the upshot- housing portal to make their reservations?

room block

Marking Lomanno, a partner and senior adviser with Kalibri Labs, believes advertisements from travel disbelieve companies resonate more with attendees than email alerts well-nigh convention housing.

Around 48 percent, according to the findings from "Room Cake of the Futurity." The written report, conducted past Kalibri Labs and Prism Advisory Group — with funding from the PCMA Foundation, Hilton Worldwide, and NYC & Company — analyzed a mix of citywide conventions in Houston, New York Metropolis, and San Diego. In addition to combing through more than ii meg anonymous hotel and Airbnb guest records from 2015 to 2018, researchers surveyed 750 convention attendees to understand what factors went into their conclusion to book inside or outside the group room block.

Mark Lomanno, a partner and senior adviser with Kalibri Labs, was surprised to discover that an additional 23 percent of attendees actually stayed at hotels in the room block — information technology'due south simply that they made their reservations via a channel other than the effect's housing arrangement. So while 71 percent of attendees stayed in the cake, organizers may have received only credit for 48 percent.

"You assume that if someone is going to book exterior the block, they're going to stay at a different hotel," Lomanno told Convene. "Only these people were where they were expected to exist. Organizers just may not take known it." (Some planners include contract clauses stipulating that they can inquire for an inspect comparison their registration lists with hotel guests, so that they go credit for rooms booked by their attendees outside the room block, only still inside the hotel.)

If hotels and organizers are working together to offering exclusive discounted rates, why would attendees volume elsewhere? The survey shows that messages from spokespeople similar William Shatner at Priceline and Captain Obvious at hotels.com are resonating more than email reminders from event organizers. In fact, 39 percent of attendees who stayed in the block only didn't volume via the host organization believed that the event-housing system's rates were more than expensive than what they could find via their own searches.

"The organizer is only communicating to attendees on ane level. Online travel agencies employ a range of communication channels," Lomanno said, including television, social media, and impress advertisement. "The attendee who doesn't travel all the time will assume that the all-time rates are available some- where else considering they're hearing that merits a lot."

Coin, however, is non the merely deciding factor when information technology comes to booking rooms. Lomanno pointed out that many attendees want to make certain that they earn their loyalty points at their preferred hotel brands or book a particular type of hotel room — two features that may not be bachelor via the effect's housing arrangement. "For a lot of these attendees, the money isn't coming out of their [own] pockets," Lomanno said. "Information technology's coming from their company. So paying a few more dollars to get the exact room you want or to make sure you accumulate your loyalty points doesn't affair."

Lomanno highlighted that the first phase of the research aimed to sympathise "what attendees did and why they did it." At present, the plan for phase two includes broadening the number of perspectives. "Nosotros're going to ask some different questions now that nosotros have a solid foundation of what's really happening from an attendee'south signal of view," Lomanno said. "Nosotros'll talk to event organizers, hotel executives, housing groups, and other result stakeholders to become a real idea of how to build the room cake of the future."

David McMillin is an associate editor at Convene.

Register for EduCon

How can you best programme for today'southward attendee booking decisions? Mark Lomanno and Elaine Hendricks will lead a 2019 PCMA EduCon session assuasive yous to dive into the research discussed in this story. Sign up today on our EduCon site.

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Analyzing the Next Generation of Accommodations

Event organizers are grappling with the attitudes and expectations of millennials and Generation Z attendees when designing the on-site experience, simply it appears that learning styles and networking needs aren't the just things to which they need to pay attention. The initial findings of the room block enquiry revealed that younger attendees have a different approach to booking hotels, besides. 50-nine percent made their reservations outside of the traditional conference hotel room-block channel.

"Someone over twoscore is much more probable to become through the traditional booking process," Kalibri Labs' Marking Lomanno told attendees at a Convening Leaders 2019 session. "What we don't know is whether the nether-40 group volition get more traditional as they get older, or if information technology'southward a behavior that they volition stick with moving forwards. When thinking about the room block of the future and how to make the invitee experience better, this is something to consider and something to further written report."

Read our previous story: "Making Sense of Room Block Decisions".