We're all working in a high-demand period. For lots of reasons, meeting planners are buying short-term, which creates a virtual jump ball for availability. With that in mind, hotels, convention centers and destinations are evaluating your statistics. Your data. Suppliers are evaluating the value of your business prior to proposing rates, dates and space. It's survival of the fittest, or at least survival of the most prepared.
All business transactions leave a financial footprint and yours is unique to your event or the business you generate. Do you know your true value? Are you leveraging your buying power and backing it up with real data? You should be.
To calculate your trackable direct spend, add your room rate, historic F&B spend, historic A/V spend, most recent operational costs and rental, then multiply that total by the historic number of hotel rooms you utilize (both in and outside of your official block). Combine this with the assumed ancillary revenue associated with your attendees' cups of coffee, parking, dinner, souvenirs for the kids at home and other assumed conference associated costs, and you have your economic impact.
In addition to economic impact, your DMO representative can help you include the following information in your RFP:
- Estimated tax revenue your group will generate for the city and state in which you are meeting.
- The number of full-time jobs or employees (FTEs) your meeting, conference or convention will support.
- How your higher percentage of fly-in guests positively impacts the overall value to the destination.
In many cases, planners don't understand the full breadth of their buying power, but I can assure you that most suppliers do. Many CVBs, including GoProvidence, use an industry-researched, developed and maintained economic impact calculator that sorts key financial data points associated with a group and calculates the estimated financial impact. We do an estimate before the opportunity is sourced to the marketplace so everyone can see the value of the business and its potential impact on the destination.
Planners who don't express this value can find themselves competing for dates with another group which may be of lesser value to the destination. Demand is high and revenue managers are in control. Providing information up front significantly strengthens your buying power.
The next time you source a city via a CVB or DMO, ask them to run a calculation prior to sourcing the business to the market. Chances are that this value may place you in the driver's seat.
