GroupRes For Meeting Planners


	GroupRes is specifically designed to automate several of the functions that Meeting Planners have had to do manually in the past. The most time consuming of these is building a rooming list for a master contract client. Whether you are an independent meeting planner or an in-house corporate meeting planner, GroupRes will dramatically increase your productivity by saving you countless hours that you currently spend creating, managing and confirming your attendee hotel reservations. 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 a meeting by filling in a simple form. Page Builder creates a Reservation 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 if applicable, cancellation and change requirements and an online booking engine. The booking engine can easily be configured to use a hidden, corporate card for master contract type bookings, pass through the attendee’s card to the hotel to guarantee, charge a deposit or prepay the reservation, or be connected to the meeting sponsor’s merchant account for either deposit charges or full reservation prepayments. The ability to charge the attendee’s card for either a deposit or a full reservation prepayment allows the meeting sponsor to receive room commission or net rate markup at the time the attendee reserves the room rather than several weeks after the meeting has taken place. This feature should be particularly attractive to Associations and seminar producers. However, it can also be used by independent meeting planners when their contract allows them to collect a commission upfront on the negotiated room rate by just charging the commission amount as a reservation guarantee deposit. 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 sponsor’s website and included with any other promotional or information literature concerning the meeting. 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.

	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 attendee 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 room block. The hotel also saves a significant sum by not having to employ its reservation staff to manually enter your rooming list or accept reservation calls from your attendees. This 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. For those who manage multiple meeting planners, it is easy and efficient to review the status of the reservation activity for all the meetings under production by your planning staff. Not having to request progress reports 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. If your Company uses cube applications for spend analysis, GroupRes not only maintains all your meeting information in a singular data format, it can easily stream that data into your cube app. By providing the meeting sponsor with a password-protected login, you will totally eliminate the time invested in answering requests for status reports from the meeting sponsor. This real-time access to the status of their meeting reservations also allows the sponsor to be more efficient and proactive in getting their invitees to finalize their reservations and complete their room block requirements.

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