MeetingBroker Aims For End-End, RFP-Hotel Connection
<B>MeetingBroker Aims For End-End, RFP-Hotel Connection</B>
By Chris Davis
Flush with $20 million in new capital, Portsmouth, Mass.-based Newmarket International has expanded the reach of its MeetingBroker.com conduit between Web sites and hotels. The technology, which allows meetings RFPs to automatically be received and analyzed by properties' management systems, could become a key component in the online meeting booking process.
MeetingBroker, which planners never have a need to come into contact with as it is not a meeting portal, receives RFPs that planners create and send through other Web sites, recodes the RFP into a standard format and sends it to participating hotels that possess Newmarket's Delphi or Breeze property management software. In all, Newmarket has identified 65 sites that can send RFPs and has contracted with about 13 of them, including Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and online meeting suppliers AllMeetings.com and MADSearch.com.
"MeetingBroker is written in XML and the beauty of it is that all 65 sites do things in different ways and every planner does it his or her own way, but in MeetingBroker the RFP comes in the specific fields Newmarket has developed," said Newmarket CEO Steve Giblin. "It standardizes the RFP and eliminates the issue of standardizing the RFP process." The property management software then analyzes the RFP based on specific parameters chosen by individual management, including date, cost and potential guest room, meeting room and ancillary revenue. Hotel sales managers then can secure meeting and guest room space for the event.
"We have underlying algorithms built into our system that take available information coming off the e-RFP and run it through the marketing and pricing plan for the hotel," Giblin said. "It comes back with a recommended price and dates and whether the meeting passes or fails the hotel's marketing plan for each revenue area. If so, it can secure inventory in the hotel in two clicks of a mouse. Sales managers could handle 100 leads a day and it takes away the administrative duties that keep them from selling."
At the moment, only a handful of hotels and conference centers are hooked into MeetingBroker.
Newmarket will use the $20 million it secured last month from a venture capitalist that officials wouldn't name to develop netDelphi 2000, its new Web-enabled property management application that automatically will connect to MeetingBroker.
Giblin was quick to stress that MeetingBroker was not created to restrict its compatibility only to Newmarket's property management software. "This is a totally open system," he said. "If somebody wants to use MeetingBroker to connect to another system at a hotel or simply as an e-mail conduit, they can."
Neither planners nor online RFP providers are charged for MeetingBroker service, rather, hotels are charged an annual fee of $250 for each user of the property management software.
"The benefit to corporate planners is the speed in which their requests for proposals can be turned around," said Rodd Herron, vice president of sales development for Wyndham, which currently is MeetingBroker's most frequent user, with four properties hooked into the system. "Even with electronic RFPs e-mailed directly to hotels from planners or third parties, hotels still have to take the RFP out of e-mail, adjust it so it meets Delphi's standards and input it into Delphi. This makes what was a two-to-eight-hour process take 15 minutes."
Herron said the speed of response benefits both planners and hotels. "Anything that reduces the cycle time of the lead is a bandwagon I want to step on," he said. "Where I've been, planners in focus groups have always stressed that they want leads responded to and calls returned quickly, and this certainly does that. It enables the hotel to handle a higher volume of leads per day as well."
Glenn Bingham, president of AllMeetings.com, said, "We'd obviously like to be hooked in to hotels as tightly as possible in terms of sending and receiving information. They're a key player, and we'd love to move in a direction where hotels can have leads in real time."
Eventually, Giblin sees MeetingBroker as a single conduit between meeting planners and convention service managers. "The future is online convention services and conference planning," he said. "The vision is to have the meeting planner and the convention service manager going through the complete convention résumé online. With the advent of the electronic signature, you would have an end-to-end connection. Not just booking, but actually planning through MeetingBroker.