ensuring that you’re getting the most back to do that first round of elimination for hotels that have space available.” Dominguez thinks it might also be helpful to

have a preliminary step in advance or in lieu of a full-fledged RFP — an RFI (request for infor- mation). “If you are looking at three different destinations and a whole bunch of hotels,” he said, “candidly, what you need to know is that I can handle your meeting. Do I really need to tell you at that point which ballroom I’m going to put you in if you haven’t even decided which city you’ll be in?”

2 Planners need to be more disciplined. Just like when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail — when you’re sending out an eRFP, every venue looks like a potential fit, because it takes no more effort to reach a hundred venues than it does to reach one. “There are planners that have been abusive of this system, and we have shut them down because we don’t believe in their logic,” Malhotra said. “They will send [an RFP] to a

five-star hotel and a local motel for the same piece of business. That does not make sense, so we’ll give them warnings and we have no qualms about telling planners that we are going to shut you down and disable access to the system.” This is where it’s on planners to think seriously about their meeting before distributing their RFP. “If there is any opportunity for [planners] to nar- row their search down to either a destination or a brand or a type of hotel prior to pushing the but- ton,” Vonderheide said, “it certainly is appreciated by the hotels. It allows us to concentrate and jump on the business that is most relevant to us and not lose one of their very important meetings in the minutiae of leads that may or may not be relevant for your hotel.” Added Foy: “Two or three minutes of extra work will save hours on the back end. To me, that’s just the bare-bones basics, but a lot of people overlook it because these systems make it so easy.” To that end, Schultz would like to see RFPs — electronic or otherwise — get their due as a

Michael Dominguez

‘Do I really need to tell you which ballroom I’m going to put you in if you haven’t even decided which city you’ll be in?’

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PHOTOGRAPH BY TK