Crowne Plaza Hotels and Resorts last month introduced a comprehensive questionnaire about its corporate meeting offerings, seeking opinions from meeting planners who stage events at the chain's properties on each aspect of the hotel's performance vis-à-vis the full planning process.
In what is the latest of a flurry of recent moves designed to raise the profile of Crowne's corporate meeting offerings, the questionnaire is designed to offer standardized ratings of each property's ability to meet planner needs throughout the planning process, from sales and pre-event operations to the event itself and post-event billing, said vice president of brand management Kevin Kowalski.
While post-event hotel meeting surveys are nothing new to the industry, this effort, which Crowne Plaza dubbed its Meetings Satisfaction Tracking System, is the chain's first program that covers every meeting at every hotel. It also is another move in what has been an active year for meeting promotions for Crowne Plaza and its corporate parent, InterContinental Hotels Group. In May, Crowne Plaza announced that buyers would receive a $5 credit to their master meeting account for every room night consumed
(Meetings Today, June 9), and between January and April InterContinental Hotels & Resorts temporarily waived all attrition and cancellation fees.
The questionnaire, to be used by all properties in The Americas, was designed to assess the effectiveness of other Crowne Plaza meeting initiatives, including the establishment of a single point of contact for planners throughout the meeting process, and a daily meeting during the event to gauge operations. "We want a standard form and process for all meetings," Kowalski said. "There's a ton of questions. As a whole, the industry does not do a good job with responsiveness, with establishing a single point of contact and with billing and follow-up."
Though Crowne Plaza will compare and contrast results to determine relative strengths and weaknesses of individual properties, the chain will not yet use the survey as the basis to make extensive changes to hotel personnel. The chain does not yet have a third party to impartially tabulate the responses, although Kowalski hopes that will be in place next year. "There will be follow-ups with strong negative and positive feedback and a weekly summary and monthly trends analysis of the numbers," he said, "but we need to take the hotel out of the loop for tabulation and turn it entirely over to a third party."
The $5 rebate per room night offer has proceeded well, Kowalski said. The chain has no way of measuring precisely how much corporate meeting business it has generated directly, but he noted that the $5 offer also can serve as an additional negotiating tool. He said the chain has tracked about $500,000 in booked group revenue through a toll-free number distributed with marketing materials distributed for the promotion.