GroupRes For Associations


	Associations can particularly benefit from implementing a GroupRes Solution to manage the accommodation booking process for their meetings and conferences. GroupRes will dramatically increase your productivity by saving you countless hours that you currently spend creating, managing and confirming your attendee hotel reservations. It also accelerates your cash flow by allowing you to collect room commissions when your attendees make their booking as opposed to several weeks after your conference. Let's see how the three major components of GroupRes can work for you.

	GroupRes has developed a proprietary "Page Builder" application that allows you to create an information and booking page for your meeting by filling in a simple form. Page Builder creates a booking page that presents all of the essential information about the meeting such as the meeting description, meeting contact person, hotel description, directions and map, meeting dates, room types available, room prices, cancellation and change requirements and an online booking engine. The booking engine can easily be configured to pass through the attendee’s card to the hotel to guarantee, charge a deposit or prepay the reservation, or it can be connected to your merchant account to either charge a deposit or require full reservation prepayments. The ability to charge the attendee’s card for a deposit allows your Association to receive the room commission by just charging the commission amount as a reservation guarantee deposit. By matching a deposit to a cancellation fee, every reservation results in immediate available cash flow. You can also provide for automatic price increases determined by the date a booking is made. The ability to offer a lower price as an incentive for early bookers and a higher price penalty for later or last minute bookers, helps solidify your room block at the earliest possible date and gives you the opportunity to negotiate additional rooms if needed. Once the Reservation Page has been built, a link to that page can be easily inserted into invitation e-mails sent out to all of the invitees. This link can also be put on the Association’s website and included with any other promotional or information literature concerning the meeting or conference. However, if you already have a rooming list, you can upload that list into GroupRes and GroupRes will stream that information into the hotel's CRS returning a live confirmation number to the GroupRes database and automatically send out confirmation emails to all the attendees. Because you only pay by reservation, there is no front end cost to acquire a GroupRes Solution, so even using GroupRes once per year is cost effective whether for a thousand room reservation conference or a 10 room board meeting.

	A key function of the Reservation Page is to provide the online booking engine that connects directly in to the hotel’s central reservation system. This allows your attendees to receive a real-time confirmation number from the hotel. This also allows your attendees to manage their own reservation should they need to cancel or modify it. If they have special needs or requests, they can make those directly to the hotel and the person responding at the hotel can immediately find their booking in the hotel system. Because all of your meeting’s bookings are resident in the hotel central reservation system, your sales contact at the hotel and the hotel revenue manager are able to constantly monitor the take-up level of your room block. This eliminates calls from your sales contact for updates and also gives you additional bargaining power in your negotiations. Further, because the hotel has greater visibility of future inventory levels, it is more likely that you will get a favorable response should you require additional rooms above your initial room block. The hotel also saves a significant sum by not having to employ its reservation staff to manually enter your room the list or accept reservation calls from your attendees. This also results in significant savings to the hotel which you should be able to use to your advantage in your negotiations.

	Every time one of your attendees makes a reservation, all the details pertaining to that reservation are retained in a database which can be accessed by the meeting planner and by anyone granted access by the meeting planner through a password-protected login. This may include the officers and directors of the Association or other individuals that you deem may need access to this information. Not having to request progress reports from the hotel saves both the time invested in the request and the time invested in the production of the reports. Because the database is maintained in a secure, online environment, these reports can be accessed at any time from anywhere. This real-time access to the status of your meeting reservations also allows you to be more efficient and proactive in getting your invitees to finalize their reservations and complete your room block requirements.

	If you would like to receive the benefits of the increased productivity that GroupRes offers to Associations, please click the button and find out how easy it is to implement a GroupRes Solution into your operations.