What are the best strategies to avoid cancellation or attrition penalties for meetings?

Hotels evaluate your business, against other potential leads in their system, to determine if it is the best potential fit for the open dates and space that they have available in the hotel. They evaluate the number of rooms you have on a peak night, your pattern (when your peak nights fall in the week), your food and beverage spend, and your historical ancillary spend in outlets (restaurants/spa/golf). Knowing your history, and all of your flexibility (pattern/dates), and communicating it accurately, will net the best potential bid from a hotel.

Most hotels are looking at a piece of business for the revenue it will generate. Rooms, F&B, Golf, Gaming, and Spa are all taken into consideration. The other considerations are long term business relationships, payment, as well as history. Agreements are always give and take and should not be one sided.

Your history is gold in a sellers market. Multiple Sales Managers may be selling into the same open set of dates, so assisting your Sales Manager with accurate data points for your business, is the most vital tool they have to pitching your program internally, and getting a competitive bid back from the team. Failing to accurately disclose what you historically spend, or how you historically pick up, will lead to hotels declining to bid, or presenting you with offers that are less aggressive, with lower value concession packages.

Your RFP process should not only include specs about your rooms and space, but also any question you may have regarding a venue's position on any key contracting areas. If you have non-negotiable clauses (specific force majeure terms, rights of termination clauses, lowest rate clauses) that are non-starters for your legal or procurement departments, communicating those in advance can save you and your venue partners, a ton of wasted time and energy. Provide them in your Request For Proposal form, so that venues may ask any questions they may have at the start of the submission process.

If it isn't in black and white, and it isn't dually signed - it doesn't count. Handshake agreements don't count in the event of a dispute. Sales Departments change constantly, and your contact could be gone tomorrow.

Make sure and create calendar appointments for yourself, and any major stakeholders, for any deadline outlined in the agreement, with a reminder set two (2) weeks in advance, to avoid missing them. Adding group rated rooms to an agreement can be as difficult as subtracting them, when you get within four (4) months of your arrival date. Make it a habit, at the conclusion of every event you have, to set aside a few hours to review all future year's agreements to ensure they are properly blocked and that meeting space allocations fit your program as it evolves. The further out you book, the more critical this habit becomes.