Hilton Hotels Corp. earlier this month introduced a soft-dollar meetings package offering discounts on ancillary service fees and complimentary upgrades and services.
The package currently is offered at 30 Hilton properties and applies to meetings booked by June 30 of at least 25 rooms on its peak night and held by early April 2005.
The deal shuns hard-dollar discounts on room rates or total meeting costs, unlike a spate of 2003 promotions offered by several chains
(Meetings Today, June 9, 2003). Though the economic landscape of the meetings industry has changed in the past year, and several hotels have reported a desire to maintain rate integrity and promote ancillary discounts, Hilton's Northeast regional vice president of sales and marketing David Keys said the new Hilton program is simply a larger rollout of a program that has proven successful at one property.
"This was locally driven from the New York Hilton," Keys said. "They put this program in place and felt it really drove incremental revenue on dates when the hotel needed it. They brought it to the national level, and we offered it to our largest meeting properties."
The new program was offered to Hilton's 50 largest meeting and convention properties, and 30 initially accepted, Keys said. The chain expects more hotels to sign on in the future and that some of the hotels that initially declined to participate will reverse course.
The meeting package includes a complimentary continental breakfast with every booked luncheon, a complimentary room for every 25 occupied, one upgrade to a suite at the group rate, complimentary meeting space for a general session, a 25 percent discount on audiovisual equipment and a 15 percent discount at hotel food and beverage outlets, among other perks. "We've learned that the customer is looking for value, and these came up as ways to add value to the organization," Keys said. Rate or total cost discounts do so as well, he said, but the chain will offer what appeals to meeting planners and buyers. "It depends on what drives the organization. Giving these discounts seems to work."
The package is the second meetings-related program introduced by Hilton in 2004. In January, the company introduced a software application that matches hotel reservations with attendee registration lists for a particular meeting, allowing planners to determine the booking method used by each attendee
(Meetings Today, Jan. 19).