T SPAM, A LOT

Online platforms for eRFPs hit the market in a big way four or five years ago, right about when

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o be sure, the rise of online platforms

that let you electronically submit your RFP to any number of hotels and other venues at one time has been a boon for meeting bookings, bringing busi- ness leads directly to salespeople who otherwise might not have seen them. But on the flip side, eRFPs can bring a lot of leads to those salespeople — sometimes indiscriminately, wasting their time and yours, and sometimes simply more than they can handle in a timely manner, which means they can’t answer you as quickly and with the detail you’d like. The problem is acute enough that there’s a name for it: lead spam. “The truth of the matter is, the [planner] is going to choose one property in one city to do this meeting,” said Gus Vonderheide, vice president of global sales – Americas for Hyatt Hotels Corporation. “And yet they have 50 hotels spinning through hoops trying to get back to that customer to determine whether there is availabil- ity or not, when maybe the customer never really considered Boston — Philadelphia was always their choice, but they wanted to make sure they were getting all of the information they could. “Multiply that by the amount of RFP organiza- tions out there and the amount of organizations who are using this tool to source their business today,” Vonderheide said, “and you can imagine that there are thousands and thousands of leads that are out there in space that are not really ever going to land in the property. But yet the hotels are having to jump through hoops to get those done.” All that said, there’s good news — for planners,

hotels, and suppliers alike. “I think as an industry we have identified the problem with RFP spam,” Vonderheide said. “It was somewhat frustrating from the hotels’ perspective a while back that we didn’t really think that the third-party RFP pro- viders were really listening or hearing, and I can say today that I think it is absolutely top of mind. And that’s a huge step in the right direction.”

the economy went south, and for a while they seemed like an answer to the prayers of sales teams everywhere — at a time when business was drying up, leads were coming in from all over. But as the economy recovered and group business wasn’t so hard to come by, the sheer volume of eRFPs threatened to become overwhelming. It takes a salesperson an average of 20 to 30 minutes to respond to an RFP, according to Elite Meetings International, which offers an RFP engine for higher-end hotels and resorts. And over the last three years, the number of RFPs sent to hotels has increased by 300 percent. “I feel like it came in a perfect storm where

hotels were seeing [the financial crisis in] 2008 happen and hotel rates came down and meetings were shot, and you couldn’t do anything in resorts. So there were a lot of things that were happening at the time,” said Bharet Malhotra, vice president of sales for Cvent, which also offers an online-RFP platform. Today, “there’s no doubt that we have increasingly heard the whole concept that hotels are getting a lot of leads and they’re converting less than they used to, or planners are not hearing back in the right amount of time that they need to hear back, and whatnot.” Added Robert Gilbert, CHME, CHA, president and CEO of Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI): “They make it too easy to handle it. That is part of the problem. I think planners get a bad rap when they push out 20 or 30 or 40 eRFPs to that many hotels and des- tinations, and all of a sudden on the hotel or the DMO side, they’re getting the same lead from two or three different sources. They may be getting it from a third party. They may be getting it from a DMO. And they may be getting it direct.” Dave Nostrand, Marriott International’s vice president of sales for the Americas, points out that in their eagerness to cover all their bases, plan- ners can actually shoot themselves in the foot.

“We often experience a high number of hotels requested on customer RFPs, which often stems from the customers sourcing multiple hotels,”

APRIL 2013 PCMA CONVENE 45

Gus Vonderheide

‘I think as an industry we have identified the problem with RFP spam.’