Events Get Creative | Hotels scurry to meet needs, budgets
At the Beechwood Hotel in Worcester, as is the case at many area hotels, business bookings are finally starting to recover from the recession.
People are planning meetings, trainings and conferences, and that makes Lynn Cheney, the director of sales and catering, happy.
But people are also planning all these things differently than they did before 2008, and that makes Cheney very, very busy.
Cheney said many businesses who call her want smaller events than they once did. Many are also planning things on a last-minute basis as they make a final decision that they can afford to pull off an event. And almost everyone wants to tweak their plans to make sure they’re getting everything they can for their dollar.
“ ‘We’re doing it a little differently than we have in the past,’ is something that I’m hearing on a daily basis,” she said.
Better, Not Great
At the Embassy Suites Boston-Marlborough, Director of Sales and Marketing David LeTellier sees some business clients loosening their purse strings just slightly.
“Some of those who may have been meeting with us have somewhat more liberal — I won’t go so far as to say robust — budgets to deal with,” he said.
LeTellier said he sees some companies that nixed expensive in-person gatherings in favor of video conferences and phone calls changing their tune. For both client-facing and internal events, he said, people are becoming more convinced of the necessity of face time.
But when it come to budgets, LeTellier said he sees a much more competitive market, with clients ready to change their events around to save money and competitors happy to offer deep discounts to get business.
“I think there’s a lot more wheeling and dealing that’s being done,” he said.
Christine Kelly, director of sales at the Best Western Royal Plaza Hotel and Trade Center in Marlborough, said it makes sense for hotels to be ready to make a deal. For example, she said, it’s common to throw in a free breakfast or meeting room if it means booking overnight guest rooms for meeting participants.
“That’s where they make the biggest profit,” she said.
Government Deficit
If corporate events are coming back, though, Kelly said government-funded ones are on the decline. She said she’s seeing nonprofits that once split event costs with state or federal funding sources now trying to do cheaper versions on their own.
And in some cases, she said, the state forbids events that it funds from including any food at all.
Cheney said companies’ cost-cutting efforts can make it more difficult for hotel staff to put together a package that works.
But she said if clients are willing to get creative and put their cards on the table, they can sometimes find ideas that work even better than more expensive options they might have defaulted to in the past.
For example, she said, instead of using the hotel’s banquet menu, meeting planners may decide to offer attendees limited options from the hotel restaurant. Then the participants can either head up to the restaurant together at their lunch break or have the food brought down. Cheney said it’s a more affordable option and offers people more choices.
Coming up with new ways of doing things can also be a good change of pace for hotel staff, she said.
“It’s kind of nice, because it makes it kind of stimulating,” she said.
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