Meeting News - September 21, 2009 - (Page 62)

News Mason Redefines Gaylord Sales Strategy continued from page 1 prevalent. From what we’re experiencing, it’s not happening. are far more open, honest and giving, so we are able to get to a win-win much quicker. We all feel like we’re in it together, so if there’s a silver lining, we’ve grown a lot closer in terms of trying to rely on each other in terms of a solution. MN: Will that carry over after we see recovery? Mason: We learned a lot from the recession in 2001. 2000, at the time, was the industry’s best year. Customers were feeling a little taken advantage of, and hotels were not treating the customers well. When we came out of it, it was the customers’ opportunity to turn the tables, and we all agreed we’d never let that happen again. Now, we have learned once again another valuable lesson: We’ll never get through it without some give and take on both sides. Some hotels and customers would dig their heels in on negotiations, and when you do that, you’ll never get to the middle. We started there in 2009, not believing what was coming, but now that we’ve been there, bloodied, and have experienced the wrath of the economy, we’re all in a different place now. My hope is that we never lose that, but you never know. MN: How has your business held up this year? Mason: We’ve had, relatively speaking, pretty solid quarters, and that speaks to a couple things to our business model. As other brands were sending out their discounts and deals and flooding the airwaves, we purposely stayed out of that mix, because if we were going to come out with anything, we wanted it to be something more sustainable beyond what we’re experiencing right now. We found a few things in our research that were important to our customers and created programs that helped us certainly in the first two quarters but continued to provide support beyond that. The first program is what we call Total Meeting Price, and it really spoke to the group of smaller meeting planners who were struggling with trying to stay within a budget instead of being nickel-and-dimed. This is a way for a hotel company to put a bow around the entire meeting experience and hand it to the customer so they can see what they’ll be spending. We rolled that out and have been very successful, especial62 MeetingNews September 21, 2009 MN: Is there opportunity for you with compaly for our small meetings. nies trading down from luxury properties? The other, the most compelling, is what we call Mason: Absolutely. We’re booking business that One Partner. That really came out of our cus- had in the past used the more luxury, upper tomers struggling with attrition and cancella- upscale brands. We’re finding, especially on the tions. We created an opportunity for our cus- corporate side, that they’d rather have an incentomers to continue to book meetings with tive program, which would have gone to a RitzGaylord and get credit to either their attrition Carlton or Four Seasons, and a sales meeting that plan or future programming. If you have a meeting in 2009 or 2010, and you book another meeting with us, you get to utilize 10 percent of the total value of that first meeting toward your other meetings. If you have a milliondollar program, you have $100,000 in the bank you can use either against the attrition of that meeting or to the Texan Resort is Gaylord’s business travel leader master account of the second meeting. That has broken through the clutter. Between those two, we feel that our little company was able to create a pretty decent buzz. MN: Did this affect the volume of requests for proposals ? Mason: We saw a definite uptick in RFPs. We had some great production from both programs, and One Partner has performed very well for us. MN: Is any of this spun from companies trying to get more control over smaller meetings? Mason: It absolutely is. We went through a phase where there was an anti-meeting mentality. We’re coming out of that. As we do, there are a lot of eyeballs on the meeting budget, asking all the right questions. Maybe they assumed too much in the prior years, and now that we’ve sort of had this evolution in terms of the value of meetings, this certainly is an answer to that. MN: Are we past the “AIG effect?” Mason: It depends on where you sit. If I ran a hotel in Vegas, Tucson, Phoenix or Scottsdale, I’d say probably not. The data reflects they’re still struggling, but there’s a general sense of getting back to business. The AIG effect in Gaylord world is no longer would have come to us instead be combined into a different type of experience for their salespeople. They’re eliminating the actual incentive trip and lumping it together. Winners on their sales team get upgrades and a different experience in the hotel, but it’s all part and parcel of the national sales meeting. We’re seeing the benefits, with more spending on food and beverage and creating that different level of experiences. MN: Are you seeing a similar convergence of group and transient negotiations? Mason: Yes, and we’ve deployed a strategy against that. We have some hotels that do much better on the business transient side. The Gaylord Texan Resort is our leader, and we combined the efforts of our business transient teams with our national sales organization, which are working together on that single point of contact. It’s surprising the number of meeting leads we get out of the business travel contacts in those organizations. MN: Are booking windows still shrinking? Mason: Yes, they’re very short. We’re booking business five years out even now, but those that typically book two or three years out are waiting and booking nine months out. So, we see that 2010 could still be alive and kicking. H www.meetingnews.com http://www.meetingnews.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meeting News - September 21, 2009

Meeting News - September 21, 2009

Contents
Pricing Forecast
Newsmaker
Meetings Spotlight
Event Profile

Meeting News - September 21, 2009

Meeting News - September 21, 2009 -

Meeting News - September 21, 2009

(Page Cover1)
Meeting News - September 21, 2009 -

Meeting News - September 21, 2009