Every year hotels around the world compete for corporate business. The “RFP season” as it is known in the industry, involves corporate travel managers sending an RFP (request for proposal) bid to a hotel from a client such as IBM, Vodafone or HSBC. While the contracts for these clients can be extremely lucrative for a hotel, RFP submission can be a daunting process to most hotel managers. Particularly for the independent properties who often lack a dedicated sales manager.
HotelREZ Hotels & Resorts currently offers an online tool, REZtoMarket, aimed at simplifying the laborious submission process, which combines the numerous RFP tools that corporate clients use, into one easily accessible and centrally managed RFP tool.
However using an online tool to respond to RFP bids is only one part of the business opportunity; there are many corporate RFPs that a hotel may qualify for, but due to a lack of awareness or oversight from a travel manager, the hotel may not be invited to submit a bid. For most independent hotels, this is sadly where they loose most business to competitors, in particular the branded chains.
Through its own demand generation team, HotelREZ has always worked hard to identify new corporate business for its member hotels, on top of the RFPs the properties are already invited to; assuring they can play on a level playing field with the branded chain hotels.
This year, however, the company has decided to take its demand generation even further, by investing in a new tool, TargetworX™, from partner Nexus, which will be used by all its member hotels, at no additional cost.
Josef Lapka, Executive Director Business Operations for HotelREZ, explains:
“With TargetworX™, HotelREZ is now able to propose new potential corporate business to hotel members. For each identified opportunity, hotels are simply asked to answer a set of qualifying questions, allowing them to build a business case as to why they should be invited to submit an RFP.
An additional benefit to hoteliers is the fact that we will present their business case for them, and work on the hotel’s behalf with the corporate programme managers. This means potential additional revenue from the extra corporate business we might be able to secure for them.”
Bjoern Kirchhof, Managing Director for Nexus, also commented:
“TargetworX™ ensures a fast and efficient communication between a hotel chain or representation company, and its portfolio of properties. It will allow the HotelREZ sales team to easily create compelling business cases for each of its hotel members. Using a wide range of status flags, the application makes sure every property will know in what stage the process is at, and on-screen summaries display how every opportunity is progressing.”
Want to know what HotelREZ can do for your Hotel?
HotelREZ Hotels & Resorts is a hotel representation company providing distribution, sales and marketing consultancy and technology to independent hotels and small chains. We provide properties with GDS representation under our own HO chain code, and help market hotels to thousands of travel and MICE agents and partners worldwide. For more information on joining our portfolio of unique and independent hotels contact our Business Development team today or complete our hotel membership enquiry form.