A Most Unpleasant Stay

August 19th, 2008 Chris Posted in Marketing, Operations | 1 Comment »

I’m very glad we’re on vacation this week. Although vacation is always a bit relative with us. Like most with a micro business, there never really is 100% down time as you’re in critical path for so many activities. But that does mean that I get to drink a beer in the afternoon while being mildly productive.

One of the reasons why I’m glad is I was completely frustrated last week just as we were winding up before leaving to drive to P.E.I. As I’ve mentioned before, I am always loathe to outsource activities that we can do ourselves. With the exception of where we clearly don’t have the skills. Things like accounting, large volume printing, etc…

Well, I found another one. I’d like to think that I’m not a completely useless as contract negotiation. I’ve been fortunate to work on deals big and small in the high tech community. Folks in these negotiations run the range from reasonable to out-right snakes. But at least I could always figure out a way to make a deal happen.

Then I went up against the hotel industry. And I was ill prepared.

As I hope you know (and our encouraged to attend), we hold an annual event in Ottawa. It’s been growing every year so we now need to plan quite a few months in advance. So off I went down the list of of hotels that we were targeting.

One by one I called and one by one, my attempts to do business with them were thrarted. Not because we didn’t agree on terms. Because I was told no dates were available, my event wasn’t big enough or they simply couldn’t be bothered to return my phone calls. It was like they didn’t want to do business with me at all.

Finally, I started to deal with one hotel who suggested a date and told me that our budget would fit. Awesome.

Then came the delays: I’d turn around contract comments in one day, they’d take one week. We’d agree on something verbally, then it wouldn’t appear in the contract. The final straw came when after one month of back and forth, the hotel announced that in that month they had had a lot of bookings and to secure my dates, my price had gone up, by 75%. All happening the day before our vacation.

In other words, after slow-rolling me for a month, they jacked up the price because of the delay from their slow-rolling. I walked away.

So, I now realize that I do not have the time, patience or Machiavellian acumen to deal with the hotel industry. I contacted a great event management company Colleen had met and asked them to make the problem go away.

Some things I did learn:

• Room count is king. When booking an event far out, the hotel will be looking for a large room commit.
• Without a big room count, they’ll be looking for a very big food and beverage commit.
• Booking something just a couple of months out can be done, but it’s relying on the hotel not having moved all their meeting space and looking to fill it.

And, consider an event planner when looking at conducting a good size meeting – even if just for contract negotiations. As they say, never bring a knife to a gun fight.

C.