Hyatt Hotels Corp. by
year-end plans to begin issuing automated responses to electronic requests for
proposals for meetings, using technology currently under internal development.
The company also is moving corporate transient revenue management from a
third-party provider to its internal system, senior vice president of sales
Jack Horne told The Beat.
Horne said the tool,
Quick Book, will self-populate most meetings RFP questions and provide, without
human intervention, rates, food and beverage costs and meeting room rental
information. This would alleviate a burden on the Hyatt sales team, which faces
a growing deluge of electronic RFPs from such meetings tech intermediaries as
Cvent and StarCite. A particular problem stems from third-party meetings
procurement providers like HelmsBriscoe or ConferenceDirect using those
intermediaries to submit RFPs to dozens of properties for a single event, Horne
said, leaving Hyatt's sales staff to "spend four hours per day in Cvent
filling out RFPs they never hear anything back on."
Although hoteliers are
having conversations with electronic RFP suppliers about improving the process,
Horne said Hyatt's automated tool would bring new efficiencies to the process
regardless. "Hopefully, they'll revise the tools completely so we can have
the whole thing auto-populated, at least initially," he said. "Even
if they decide to leave it at 119 questions, we can at least self-populate 70
of those questions and have less intervention from the sales manager."
Recent technology
developments within Hyatt have paved the way for this tool. The hotel company
has added to its proprietary sales database, Envision, every full-service Hyatt
hotel in North America, whether directly owned or franchised. Cvent and
StarCite also integrate with Envision. Hyatt also recently acquired its
preferred revenue management system, eFlex.
"I would consider
[Quick Book] to be state-of-the-art and unique to Hyatt in the industry,"
Horne said. "We already have our project team, and it's under
construction."
At the same time, Hyatt
is overhauling its process for responses to transient RFPs by adding to
Envision its transient customer relationship management tool, replacing its
current supplier, Salesforce.com. That would allow Hyatt sales staff, whether
they are handling transient or group sales, to work within a single system that
could link to such hotel sourcing suppliers as Lanyon, Horne said.
"If we have that,
all the worldwide salespeople will have total seamless transparency between
leads, whether they're group or transient," he said, though he could not
say when that component would be operational.
This
report originally was published in The Beat.