White Plains, N.Y. —Starwood Hotels & Resorts has created an online tool that allows planners to find a venue for a single-day meeting of up to 25 attendees, book it, and order food and beverage, audiovisual services and all other elements of the event.
Called Starwood Meetings in a Moment, the service — which can be found at www.meetingsinamoment.com —is currently available for 29 Sheraton, Westin and W hotels in the New York, Boston, Florida and Atlanta regions, and in Toronto. The program will be added at 50 more hotels by the end of July.
"Until now, the only way to book a small, relatively straightforward meeting was with several phone calls, making it time-consuming to set up," said Scott Reynolds, Starwood's manager of meetings product development.
Using the program, a planner selects a property, date, start and end times, preferred room set-up and number of attendees. The system will search for available meeting rooms, and show their capacity, dimensions and price.
When a planner clicks on a meeting room's name, a pop-up window will display a capacity chart, a description of the room, possibly some photos, and a map showing the room's location in relation to the rest of the function space.
The next screen provides food-and-beverage and audiovisual choices as well as a comment box for additional requests. Once selections are made, a review page comes up for planners to double check or change choices, then click through to a payment page.
Planners who use the site will be contacted by the hotel within 24 hours to finalize details. Customer-service assistance is available by hitting "click to call" or phoning 877-782-0143 from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST Monday to Friday and 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends.
Planners who use the site by June 30 will receive 5,000 bonus points in Starwood's Preferred Planner program for their first booking.