Eliminating the Variance Nicole Rafter

Takeaways Invoiced on system usage, not actualized rooms Billed on Wednesday following event end date Best Practices Difference between Cut-off Date, Close Down Dates, and Event End Dates

Invoicing Pop Quiz: True or False; you are invoiced based on actualize room nights? FALSE! You are billed on system usage NOT finalized rooms. I want to start by walking you through how you are invoiced; Every week I receive an automated email from the system telling me which events have ended the previous week. From that list of events, I go into the summary of each of those events to pull a PDF of booked rooms. Remember that booked rooms are all New or Accepted status reservations. I take this PDF, create an invoice, and send it out. The majority of people receive this electronically, so if you’re not sure who in your organization receives this, or you would like a copy, just send me an email (nicole@meetingmax.cc) and we can make those changes.

Wednesday You should all know that you are invoiced on the Wednesday following your event end date. I know what you’re all thinking; I NEED MORE TIME! What the Meetingmax team actually wants to focus on is NOT reconciliation but rather reducing the variance post-event to the point where you don’t even worry about it. To do that, let’s look at some best practices, but before we do I want to clarify some key terms;

Dates, Dates, & More Dates! Cut Off Date: This is the date that the system stops selling rooms. The inventory no longer belongs to you. Change Request Close Down: These are the dates in which the guests can no longer submit change requests through the link in their emails. Event End Date: This is the date your event ends. Cut Off Date: This is the date that the system stops selling rooms. The inventory no longer belongs to you. Change Request Close Down: These are the dates in which the guests can no longer submit change requests through the link in their emails. Event End Date: This is the date your event ends.

Change Request Close Down Dates Here’s some practices that we find help reduce the variance post-event. 1. You wan to make sure you’re utilizing the change request close down dates (often referred to as the close down dates). We recommend setting theses 24 hours prior to the first arrival date of your event. This way the guests can submit changes through the system as long as possible and remember that change requests can still be submitted through the system AFTER the cut-off date. We recommend 24 hours prior to arrival but its really up to you to determine what works best for your organization. The reason we suggest setting these at all is 2 fold; 1) we don’t want to have guests needing to scramble to find their emails in order to submit a change while they’re in transit – that’s a headache. 2) We don’t want hotels scrambling to process change requests at the last minute, avoiding someone arriving a date before their scheduled arrival date, submitting a change request in the parking lot and walking in 30 seconds later to a confused front desk staff. The key with this is strong communication between you and your hotels to makes sure they know all changes must go through the system up until that specified date.

Post-Event Follow Up We suggest having a template for a post-event follow up. Ideally you have a strong enough relationship with your hotels that they automatically know to send you post-event pick up automatically following the final day of the event, however this template is a good example of maintaining a strong relationship with the hotels. You can even put it right in your contract with the hotel that they are required to send you final pick up by a certain date. For instance, if you know your event ends on Sunday, April 9th, have it right in your contracts that the hotel must provide final pick up to you no later than noon on Monday, March 10th. Failure to do so results in them being responsible to pay based on pick up in Meetingmax.

Buffer Once you receive pickup reports from your hotel, you’ll want to determine a buffer percentage your organization is comfortable with. This may be 5%, 7%, 10% or more. Whatever works for you but essentially you’re then going to compare the hotel pick up with what’s in Meetingmax and if it’s within your determined variance percent, you leave it and move on. In the event the finalized pickup is outside of the determined buffer, reach back out to the hotel and tell them there’s a variance and the hotel needs to indicate where that variance is coming from (in other words provide a list of reservations that stayed less nights, more nights, cancelled, etc.) From that list, you can make the appropriate changes in the system in order to properly reflect the correct pickup. The key here is knowing what your buffer percent is though because what a lot of people fail to look at is the time that goes in to changing the rooms in order to match the final pick up. If you spend 3 hours going through and adjusting 25 room nights, you’ve saved yourself $50 and for most of you, your time is worth WELL more than $16/hour you just spend doing that. The other thing to remember is that hotels have the ability to cancel rooms though the HCP. This only applies to full cancellations, meaning the guest did not stay at the hotel AT ALL. This is ideal if there are no-shows, or perhaps a team that missed a flight so wasn’t able to get in to town… ideal for a large number of rooms that no longer stayed. The hotel cannot submit change requests through the system, that must be done through the Master Control Panel (or by the guest). This is also why we strongly urge you to charge a $4, or $5 (or more) rebate, in order to build that buffer account. And I know we some clients that come back saying they cannot charge more than the $2 as it’s simply covering the charges of the system and they cannot make money of the system, however, from an accounting stand point this should be looked at as a liability not a revenue because it’s going back into the housing system. This buffer account covers the cost of the system, including your annual renewal for the system, perhaps contributes to your Unconvention registration where you’re learning to be more efficient and effective using the system…

Lather, Rinse, Repeat The more events you run through the same hotels, the more comfortable with the process both you and they will become. The goal is to have is down to such a science that when your event ends on a Sunday, let’s say, you can expect to go in to the office Monday morning and have full pick up reports, with variance reservations included if the pick up is outside the buffer % waiting for you.

Namaste