E-mails and Web-based registration can solve attrition problems!!! Sounds like a marketing promise that'd be hard to support, doesn't it? Well, being skeptical ourselves, we examined the claims and found they stand up to real-world situations. On the list of items you have to worry about, you can give attrition a mite less weight.
First, a definition: According to the Convention Industry Council Manual, attrition is "a shortfall of sleeping room block pickup from numbers agreed to in the terms of the facility's contract." By helping drive attendees to contracted hotels and giving the planner constant access to pickup information, online reservation and registration solutions help win the attrition battle on both fronts.
Now, let's take a look at how these products can help you deal with one of the industry's biggest bugaboos.
Marketing Magic
Registration has moved online in a big way. With the online modules, the attendees themselves fill in their registration and housing needs, instead of calling the planner. Free now from the administrative tasks, while at the same time having access to more complete attendee information, the planner can actively work to avoid attrition by focusing on marketing. And she can market the meeting faster, more cheaply, and more effectively than if she used traditional methods, even increasing pick-up.
Chuck Ghoorah, senior vice president of Arlington, Virginia-based Cvent, an online registration provider, says it's all about "viral marketing." Look at it from the attendee's standpoint, he says. If you are a doctor who receives an e-mail invitation to a medical meeting, it's very easy to share that information with 20 other colleagues by simply forwarding the e-mail. "If three out of the twenty go, that's three more hotel rooms that just got filled," says Ghoorah. "What are the chances that you'll photocopy [an invitation] twenty times, address twenty envelopes, stamp them and mail them out? None." Now potential attendees are sharing information and doing some extra marketing for the event -- free of cost to the planner.
Even after the initial invitation process, online reservation systems enable planners to perform more targeted marketing to fill their blocks. "[Online registration] is a way to get data into one place that the meeting planner can manage," says Danamichele Brennen, senior vice president of marketing and chief technology officer of McGettigan Partners, a Philadelphia-based meetings consolidation firm that uses a private-label version of B-there as a part of its online registration and housing solution. The planner can filter the database to extract specific profiles on attendees, and adjust marketing efforts to target those groups. "I can go into my database and say, 'Give me everyone who's canceled,' or 'Give me everyone who registered last year who hasn't registered this year,' " says Karen Vogel, vice president, strategic alliances, for Westport, Connecticut-based B-there.com.
There's one more way online solutions fight attrition: Several of these tools, such as the "housing manager" from Event411, a Marina del Rey, California-based provider, have the ability to fill in attrition deadlines set by hotel contracts. Meeting planners at McGettigan use a proprietary "Meeting Operations" tool, which works in partnership with the attendee management module, that automatically alerts them when attrition deadlines and room block deadlines are pending, says Brennen. "It gives them the information they need to quickly run a report, see where they stand, and take actions accordingly."
The result of using the data and tools appropriately: "On average, our clients [who have never used online registration before] have seen a sixty percent increase in pickup in hotel blocks," says Vogel.
Early Response
A certain percentage of attendees will always wait until the last minute to select a housing option. This situation can leave planners with a surplus of rooms too close to the meeting date to unload them.
"If you do e-mail marketing, you get eighty percent response rate within forty-eight hours," says Ghoorah. "Of course, if you send out a paper invitation or marketing piece, it might not even make it to the person's mailbox in two days. It typically takes six to eight weeks for traditional marketing" to generate a response. The sooner you know your attendees' intentions, the earlier you can react with intensified marketing, or perhaps reduce the size of your block before an attrition deadline.
With online modules that include both housing and registration, planners can make potential attendees navigate right to the host hotel registration page, increasing the chance that they will go ahead and book their rooms at the same time that they register for the event. This helps pick-up, says Vogel, "just because that attendee doesn't have to pickup a phone or go to another site and put in all of their profile information again."
Open Communication
Planners can sometimes escape attrition fees if the hotel is alerted to a slow pickup situation early enough for release of some of the rooms. Online registration and housing tools put the information in planners' hands. "[Planners] don't have to depend on the hotel to give them an updated list to match against a list in some other system," says Brennen.
Many of these tools give planners the option of allowing the hotels access to certain reports, so the hotel can periodically check the status of the group's room block. "If you have a multiple-hotel meeting," says Vogel, "you can give access to each of the hotels to just their availability report, showing what the pickup is and what percent is still available." Giving a hotel this kind of access enables the property's sales manager to also make proactive decisions about managing the block.
This kind of access may be more than some planners are willing to share with a hotel. "The planner can decide whether or not they want a hotel to have access to [particular] pages," says Steven Koltai, CEO of Event411. "Very few of our clients who are planners actually do want the hotels to have access to the 'housing manager' directly. They want to be the ones who control that information, because that's sometimes very sensitive information." If that is the case, planners can simply issue reports from the system and fax or e-mail those to their host hotel.
He compares housing management tools to barcode scanning at a grocery store. "Instead of having someone write down every time a carton of milk is sold, it's now barcode-scanned. It's automatically removed from my inventory. I am now able to run the same size or larger store with much more accurate information and a smaller staff," says Koltai. These tools are productivity enhancers, giving meeting planners and hoteliers alike better data.
Final Analysis
Tools that manage registration and housing come at a cost. Most suppliers charge a one-time setup fee and from then on a per-transaction fee. Those costs can be intimidating to planners considering switching to an online environment. "What folks should do is sit down and calculate what's it going to cost [them] in temporary help, or lost data, or time in entering data and sorting it around and running after it, and phone calls, and anxiety, and staying up until three in the morning," says Brennen. Then, she suggests, planners should ask themselves, "If I spent this money to use an efficient and flexible tool, what else could I be doing to increase my value to my customer behind the scenes?" The answer to that question just might make the initial investment seems less daunting.