Industry Pushes Automation Of Room Block Standards

The need for a clear set of standards for automating housing and room block management is increasingly important, as meeting planners, seeking to streamline hundreds of tiny tasks and details into an efficient process, embrace systems such as EmeetingsOnline, OnVantage, Passkey and StarCite. Suppliers and analysts pointed to hotel room category definitions and transaction fee payment as aspects of room block management that require standardization.

Before the wave of automation, room block management "wasn't very nimble because it was all paper-based," said Corbin Ball, meetings technology consultant and president of Bellingham, Wash.-based Corbin Ball Associates. "These tools have improved the process quite a bit, but we still are not yet to the point where we have developed a standard. I intend to see, in the next year or so, a data mapping standard that will automate the process even more."

Ball emphasized the need to standardize definitions for each different type of hotel room to ensure everyone is on the same page when booking room blocks. "We have not standardized what we call a room: One hotel might have a number of different types of rooms, from their suites, to the VIP suites, to their executive suites," he said. "They are sliced and diced in a very complex manner sometimes."

The challenge lies in pulling all of this together. "The industry must agree upon how that can work into some type of standard, what we are going to call it and how we can fit it into a system," Ball said. "Now, a meeting planner puts together a rooming list and e-mails it to the hotel." The hotel, in turn, prints the e-mail and re-enters the data into its own system. "That 'analog' way of doing things is something that we, as an industry, have to get around."

Ball pointed to the real estate industry as an example of how standardization has streamlined processes. "A universal listing is circulated throughout the country because they have agreed on standards of what they are going to call these different types of houses and real estate properties that they are selling," he said. While the meetings and events industry is on its way to full automation, gaps in the process remain. "Right now, almost 100 percent of the time at some point in the communication process, it goes analog, and you have to print the data out and re-enter it into the system. It reduces the recipient to a clerk and the sender into a proofreader, because there are always translation errors," Ball said.

Jack Schaufele, president and CEO of EmeetingsOnline, noted that while the automation of room block management has become relatively standard, conflict arises when paying transaction fees. "We've had this technology for a couple of years, and hotels are not willing to absorb the transaction costs for meeting planners working under existing contracts," he said. As contracts are renegotiated, however, planners are introducing these fees into their agreements.

Attrition continues to be a major issue surrounding room block management and its automation. "It is just a fact of life," Ball said. "If the hotel is not offering a reasonable price or an Internet rate that is substantially lower than the median rate, then you will have people booking outside of the block."

"After 9/11, when things went really soft and the hotels were giving away so much inventory, there were so many temptations to book around the block," said Paul Rantilla, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Passkey International Inc. "As much as planners were concerned about room blocks going away, I have seen the reverse happening. They still are focused on the profitability of the group business, and technologies enable the booking and managing of the group to be done in the most efficient way possible."

This trend, however, will subside somewhat as the meetings, hotel and travel industry in general grows stronger. "As the demand for hotels and meeting rooms increase, we are going to see a standard cyclical change that always follows a business climate," Ball said. "As it gets better, available rooms get tighter and more people are going to be booking inside the block."

Jeff Rasco, president of Attendee Management Inc., a Wimberley, Texas-based meetings technology consulting firm, said planners in the future will want automated booking systems to be accessible from smaller, more portable electronic gadgets. "You have to be able to use it no matter where you are. That is a big part of it," he said. "If you are in a cab on the way to the meeting, you are going to want to use your cell phone or PDA. We may see some of these sites become enabled for PDAs."

Originally targeted at the corporate events market, Passkey's tools now are used by less formal organizations, Rantilla said: "One big surprise to us was how many non-association groups have taken to it—especially social business."