Meetings management technology company StarCite now offers buyers and hotels real-time quoted group room rates, averaged by city and property tier, based on electronic request-for-proposals data submitted through its Web site.
The company told BTN it would unveil the new option on July 27 and announce two additional technology solutions aimed at midsize companies. The company also recently announced the appointment of its new president and CEO, industry newcomer Greg Dukat.
With StarCite's rate advisory reports, buyers can access rates that hotels in a certain tier are quoting for a city at a given time. There must be at least six bids to create a data point, and the data can change daily as new rates come in.
"We actually can see into the future," said Alison Galik, vice president of shared services for StarCite. "We have bids coming in on future property rates specifically for the meetings that the planners are trying to contract for."
"I can tell you where the rates are headed in Miami for upscale full-service properties in the South Beach area for February '09," she said. "I can tell you exactly what the rates are doing—if they're increasing, if they're decreasing and how they compare to different tiers of properties in different cities."
Data requests must be made through an account manager or customer service personnel and are available via either a subscription or a per report basis for an additional charge. The report will be e-mailed to the customer.
"We'll have canned cities and data points ready to go for the most frequently used cities and properties," said StarCite's Galik, adding that the turnaround time for such reports is within 24 hours.
Reports will include both the average rate for a given city in a time period and a graph showing a trend line using historic and future data for that market. "We can help our buyers understand what the going market rates are in different cities across the world," said Kevin Young, vice president of marketing for StarCite. "We can help hotels understand their own markets and the pricing of their competitive sets."
"Having that additional intelligence will allow me to make better business decisions," said Gus Vonderheide, vice president of group sales for the Hyatt Hotels Corp. "Anytime additional tools are given to me that allow me to make better business decisions, it is a good thing."
However, Vonderheide said the tool would be more useful if it could be more specific to a hotel's competitors, rather than giving data strictly by tier. "To see all upper upscales in the city of Boston, it could be 17 or 20 hotels," he said. "It's not going to really give me a lot of good indication to what's going on, especially in a city where the hotel buckets are spread out so far."
While reports initially will focus on property tier and city, StarCite is looking to expand the data offered. "This is the first analysis on what bids come back," said Galik. "We'll dig into all kinds of things: number of attendees, the average amount spent per attendee, industry peers."
In the meantime, custom reports are available.
Knowing an average rate also will help in choosing cities and properties, said a meeting buyer from a financial company. "Having another source of data will only make us more intelligent as we go forward," the buyer said.
The data also could be used to justify increased costs to senior management.
"We all know that our average costs are going up, but many times it's hard to justify that with leadership unless you can show them external data that proves that no matter how many meetings you have to place in a particular property or city, sometimes the costs are just going to be higher," the buyer said.
"This is absolutely a decision support tool," StarCite's Galik said. "It can certainly lead to broader negotiations or faster negotiations. I have valuable, unbiased data right in front of me telling me what the market is bearing right now."
Corbin Ball, president of Bellingham, Wash.-based meetings technology consulting firm Corbin Ball Associates, said "the transparency of data is a good idea. The more open the data is about what people are actually charging, the more it tends to drive the price down. Transparency tends to reduce that friction, so to speak, of what happens when you have closed communication loops."
StarCite also plans to announce two new solutions aimed at midsize companies, which StarCite defined as those with revenue between $100 million and $1 billion.
StarCite Professional is the new midmarket version of the company's core large-market offering, StarCite Enterprise, which provides attendee management, budgeting and sourcing capabilities. However, Enterprise's large clients have full control over the tool, but Professional will have some areas, such as workflow processes, preconfigured by StarCite and based on best practices of larger companies.
"It's faster to implement," said StarCite's Young. "In many ways it's preconfigured, so there are fewer choices for companies to make when they're rolling out the software."
The other offering, StarCite Express, is intended to be a "meetings management starter package" for companies at the smaller end of midsize, Young said.
"It's an inexpensive, easy-to-use platform, intended to provide just the essential tools required for meetings management," he said. It offers attendee management, sourcing and some budgeting capabilities.
Both products will carry prices lower than the product aimed at large companies, although StarCite declined to quote prices. Professional is available and Express will be in September.
StarCite in mid-July announced Dukat, formerly head of asset management software firm Ventyx, as the company's new president and CEO. Dukat replaced former president and CEO Michael Boult, who left StarCite in March
(BTNonline, March 3).Dukat the company would focus on expanding its presence in large companies and providing smaller meetings solutions.
"Our strategy will not be a major shift, but fine-tuning what we're already on the path of," Dukat said. "Our perception, and the research we've done on our customers, is in many cases we're used at a large company that has many large meetings, but there are other areas of that company we haven't gotten to."
He added, "A lot of our initiatives now are providing and adding to our solutions for smaller meetings for large and medium-size companies."