The ability of a hotel to create a partnership with a meeting planner, or at least create the perception of one, is vital to the planner's judgment of the success of a given meeting and critical to the ability of the hotel to draw future meetings business, according to a new Maritz Hospitality Research study.
The survey of 1,700 corporate, association, independent and third-party planners measured the factors that drive planners' selection of meeting hotels, how planners assess the ability of hotels to meet their needs and book future meetings. The study was designed to examine factors beyond hotel cost and location, which are essential points of entry for any property to be considered as a site for a given meeting, said Rick Garlick, director of consulting and strategic implementation for Maritz Hospitality Group.
The study's findings highlight the importance of partnerships between hotels and planners, but that is a nebulous concept, with individual planners and hoteliers holding different definitions of what specific factors constitute a true partnership. Nevertheless, those factors are critical, Garlick said, and there are relatively universal actions hotels can take to improve planner perceptions and secure future meetings, many involving the anticipation of planner needs and meeting them before being asked to do so. Planners generally appreciate a consultative stance from a hotel, he said, rather than a property that simply fulfills requests.
"Hotels that create a culture of service listen to subtle nuances and casual mentions," Garlick said. "For example, a planner mentions that they're interested in golf at some point, and when they arrive a golf outing and transportation has already been arranged by the hotel, or a VIP gets a special amenity based on a conversation with the planner."
Yet, there are specific hotel actions that attract some planners and meeting attendees and repel others. "Personally, I like it when the front desk calls me in my room immediately after I check in," Garlick said. "We've found that a certain element of travelers love it, but others hate it, because they've just arrived or laid down. It's very polarizing, so we recommend that hotels not do things like this, where you can't predict the reaction."
In essence, planners prefer hotels where needs are anticipated, staffers are immediately responsive and problems that arise quickly are ameliorated. Better, though, is for the hotel to ensure no problems occur.
The study found that planners held higher levels of overall satisfaction and are more likely to return to the hotel if no problems occur at the meeting.
Although a hotel can recover if the problem is resolved in a way that exceeds expectations, damage is still done, Garlick said. "Problems have a devastating impact and, more often than not, rather than exceed, hotels fail to even meet planners' expectations with the resolution," he said.
There is a strain of conventional wisdom within the hotel industry that exceptional problem resolution can benefit a hotel even more than if no problem had occurred in the first place, Garlick said, but statistics consistently have failed to support that belief
(Meetings Today, Sept. 23, 2002). Though it can happen, he said, hotels that demonstrate what planners consider exceptional problem resolution also have developed what planners consider a strong relationship, the latter being more important to overall impressions of the property.
Planner responses to the survey, conducted by telephone in July and August, were very consistent about drivers of choice, experience and loyalty across hotel brands and price segments. The study showed, Garlick said, that hotels have a largely unfulfilled opportunity to build a base of future meetings business by discovering what a planner considers as necessary to the development of a relationship and then doing so.
"You don't want to create an impression that if nobody's complaining, everything is fine, and you want to create an impression that the hotel has great solutions and offers proactive advice and guidance," Garlick said. "But nobody does it consistently. There is too much focus on the operations part. There's so much opportunity for hotels to do better than they're doing."