The ideal hotel contract: yours. (hotel contracts for conferences)

the ideal hotel contract: YOURS

If you plan meetings, you've probably had some unwelcome surprises in hotel contracts. Additional charges for electricity used, finding your members got no better than the "rack" rate during conference weekend, and extra costs for quick-turnaround requests are just a few of the unexpected expenses I've encountered.

As the chief staff officer and convention manager of two small associations in Denver, I used to keep a mental list of my groups' special needs and of the things I'd been burned on over the years of putting on meetings. But in time it became more and more difficult to remember everything each time I negotiated meeting space. When the list grew too long, I knew it was time to bite the bullet and write my own contract.

The first time details go awry with a hotel contract you can call it a learning experience, but just when you begin to relax, ban, you get hit with the very same thing a second time. That's when it becomes a planning peeve.

Hotel people must think we're crazy when we come in with our lists of planning peeves. I got so bad for a time that I insisted on tape-recording everything said during a walk-through. I know it was weird, but I did it because a sales manager once promised me simple arrangements that, when I got on-site, weren't made. In that particular hotel, the sales department carried no weight at all with the banquet captain, the golf club manager, and some others who had worked there for years. My carefully planned details went for naught and I became paranoid: thus the tape recorder.

Wishful thinking

Meeting planners can list dozens of things that have happened that they want to avoid for all time. That list gets longer each year, and during hotel negotiations it results in a lot of double-checking to make sure the planner's idiosyncrasies and planning peeves are addressed.

On top of that, we all accumulate a wish list. This is a list of things that may or may not be offered by a particular hotel; nonetheless, we always want them.

Examples are the following: * "We wish all hotels would let us use their plants on our speakers' platform." * "We wish more bellhops would be working when our people arrive." * "We wish our directors could check into their sleeping rooms before noon."

For meeting planners signing hotel contracts, this means many details to be checked, loopholes to be closed, and a fair amount of verbal negotiation pertaining to the wish list when space is booked. Add up the number of meetings an association books over the years and you can see how time-consuming these negotiations are.

You are your own best

negotiator

Your time as a planner will be better spent if you take a few hours to draw up your own hotel contract instead of relying on wish lists. The …