When you have the task of arranging a hotel for a group event, you’ll quickly find yourself emersed in a world of information gathering, RFPs, and hotel proposals that need to be collected, analyzed, and compared as you search for the perfect hotel for your group event.

After all, you want to ensure you get the best group rate, a great location, and the amenities you need.

It’s a lot to juggle and manage. And there are plenty of hotel considerations to keep in mind when trying to make your crew happy:

● Room rates
● Location
● Availability
● Climate
● Amenities
● Property style
● Nearby activities

Depending on your group event, you may have even more considerations, but group rates, location, and availability are likely at the top of your list.

Pro Tip: It’s helpful to know that hotels consider a group to be 10+ rooms.

If you’ve ever tried to book 10+ guestrooms at once, you’ve likely experienced the challenges of how hotels manage group reservations.

Even your common Google search or online travel booking website will force you down a path of complex RFPs and time-consuming effort—the after effects of not having all your information centralized.

This is the exact reason why we created GroupSync, to simplify the group hotel booking process—for pro and non-pro planners alike.

GroupSync – book a group stay like a planning pro

When it comes time to find and book a hotel for your group, you’ll want the process to be easy and efficient…much like online shopping. GroupSync is all you need to search, shop, and book your hotel.

And with GroupSync, you get two ways to book, depending on your group’s size.

GroupSync Instant Booking

For smaller groups, you’ll be able to take advantage of Instant Booking—the fastest and easiest way to reserve your room block…even meeting space if needed.

If you’re looking to book 10-25 hotel rooms with a short booking window and want the convenience of online shopping, GroupSync’s got you covered. Best thing is, there’s no RFP process, you book immediately, and lock in your group rate.

GroupSync Smart RFP

And if your group event is on the larger size, GroupSync’s RFP process is a simpler way to book more than 25 guestrooms. Great thing is you’ll only create one RFP to send to all your short-listed hotels, and we made the overall booking timeframe shorter than what others can deliver.

Whether it’s your first time working with an RFP (Request for Proposal) or you’re a tried-and-true event planning professional, GroupSync Smart RFP simplifies the process.

GroupSync – perfect for anyone planning a group trip

There’s always an occasion to get a group together or to travel with friends and family. Consider the top everyday reasons to book a group, which one fits your need this year?

Event #1 – Friend Trip

Find yourself organizing a fun friend trip? Reconnecting with those you haven’t seen in a while? Whether your planning a bachelorette weekend, friend reunion, girls’ or guys’ weekend; you’ll have a ton of decisions to make.

GroupSync can make the hotel planning easier, starting with your destination city if suggestions are needed. Then, search hotels with the on-site amenities, nearby activities and points of interest to stay close to the action and minimize your transportation logistics.

Event #2 – DIY Wedding

Flowers, location, and gowns, oh my. Wedding planning can be fun and a little overwhelming, especially if you’re planning it all yourself.

Fortunately, you can simplify your guestrooms and venue planning with GroupSync. Search for the most relevant hotels by location, dates, amenities, and of course, your budget. There’s no need to wade through hotels that don’t meet your needs, GroupSync will score and rank your results based on what matters most to you.

You can even share your shortlisted hotels with your friends and family to get some help with your decision. Once you choose your hotel, you can use Instant Booking for smaller weddings between 10-25 guestrooms or use GroupSync Smart RFP for larger weddings.

Either way, ensure you understand the group attrition clause and tips to avoid penalties during your special time.

Event #3 – Team Sports Travel

Are you a coach or parent helping to make hotel arrangements for a sporting event? Away games and sports tournaments require family-friendly accommodations like on-site breakfast options and a swimming pool for keeping everyone entertained in their downtime.

You can discover what’s available within your destination with just a few clicks. GroupSync makes it easy to find the perfect hotel for your sporting event, even if you’re needing a heated pool in the middle of winter.

Event #4 – Family Reunion Time

Planning a small, medium, or large family reunion often requires travel and a need for hotel accommodations…no matter if it’s a local reunion or at some other destination.

You’ll also need to accommodate multiple age groups, interests, and different accessibility requirements. Keep everyone comfortable by inputting your criteria into GroupSync and find suitable accommodations in minutes.

Event #5 – The Group Amusement Park Trip

Planning to take a large family or group to an amusement park? You’ll probably need a room block to go with those matching colored t-shirts. GroupSync makes it easy to find your hotel based on proximity to the park, lowest group rates, and any other criteria your thrill enthusiasts will need.

With smaller groups (10-25 rooms), use GroupSync to find everything you need to make immediate reservations with Instant Booking. It’s the fastest and easiest way to book your group stay, even faster than that roller coaster you’re having second thoughts about.

There are a lot of real-life reasons when you’ll need to book group accommodations. GroupSync will make the booking process easier so you can focus on other aspects of your trip. If you want to simplify your group hotel reservations and get the best group rates for your event, give our online booking marketplace a try—sign up for free today.

As seen on Skift.com. 

Time is a planner’s most precious resource. Make the most of it by utilizing venue sourcing technology to cut through the clutter and book your meeting essentials at record speed, leaving you free to get back to what you do best: creating event magic.

If there’s one quality that makes the best event planners stand out from the crowd, it’s creativity. When it comes to the growing trend towards festivalization and experiential design, it’s absolutely essential. And in the age of rapidly-advancing artificial intelligence, creativity is a soft skill that will only grow in importance. The problem with creativity, however, is that it takes time — arguably both the most valuable and the scarcest resource that a planner has. To keep up in this new high-performance era, planners will have to find efficiencies in managing the logistical legwork behind meetings and events. Fortunately, new technology is arriving just in the nick of time to streamline one of the most stressful aspects of the job: venue sourcing.

“It’s about time,” says Tim Flors, senior vice president and chief customer officer of Groups360. Working closely with the world’s top hotel brands, Groups360 has made its hotel booking platform available at no charge for event organizers. Called GroupSync, the platform includes multiple tools and features that help to speed up the entire venue bookings process. Many meeting planners have already converted to the new way of doing business.

Think of it as an automated assistant that comes with a readymade set of RFP templates, checklists of selection criteria, and real-time data on the best available group rates for your selected dates. Then once you’ve pinpointed the right venue at the right price, it can lock those rates up for you with instant booking or an RFP. Discover 5 ways that this new tech can help you work smarter, not harder.

1. Skip the Waiting Period: Book Instantly

There are few bottlenecks more frustrating than going through the hoops of an RFP process when you already know exactly what you want, particularly if you’re trying to book a small meeting on short notice. We live in a world where it’s standard to book leisure travel instantly at the click of a button. It’s about time that group bookings caught up.

At long last, meeting planners can avoid the tiresome delays of waiting for RFP responses altogether — with GroupSync, you’re able to instantly book overnight rooms for small groups at over 9,000 hotel properties on the platform. To put that in more concrete terms, over 1.4 million group guest rooms are available for instant booking at best-available group rates, along with 66,000 meeting and event venues. And just as you can filter for properties offering incentives, you can narrow your search to hotels that have enabled Instant Booking.

Lock Down Rooms, Meeting Space, A/V Equipment & Catering

You’ll be able to see how many of each room type is available for your chosen dates, and modify your occupancy pattern to accommodate individual arrival and departure times by changing the quantity and type of each room on a specific date. You’ll also be able to review the contract before confirming, and all of the hotel’s standard policies and loyalty points will apply.

More and more brands are also making meeting space, catering, and A/V equipment available for instant booking. Want an LCD projector for your meeting space? And maybe a flipchart easel with markers for collaborative brainstorming?

How about a plate of vegan nachos at 2:15 pm? You can iron out all the details in one go, confident in the knowledge that everything you need will be available. And that ultimately means more peace of mind — and precious time — to dedicate to the creative side of planning your event.

“I can unequivocally recommend GroupSync,” says Michael Gagnon, founder and CEO of the Academic Orthopaedic Consortium. “Within minutes it provided me with top tier hotels, pricing options, perks and the micro details associated with all of this — within or below my budget.”

Similarly, hotel partners are also experiencing time-saving benefits that allow their sales teams to devote more time to their big wins. “Moving our meeting rooms to direct online booking has brought us enormous benefits. We are happy because our team members are freed up to focus their time and effort on larger revenue opportunities,” explains Keith Hudspith, head of food and beverage for Premier Inn Hotels.

2. Get to the Good Stuff: Find Your Perfect Venue Quickly

Even if you still haven’t landed on your dream venue, there are faster ways to develop a short list of top candidates. When time is of the essence, you don’t want to spend precious hours brainstorming destination or venue ideas, then sifting through mountains of options to find what might work for your requirements. With GroupSync, you can name your event, set your dates and preferences, and start browsing the system instantly.

Identify and Rank Venues & Destinations Against Key Priorities

Narrow down what’s out there by selecting the priorities that are most relevant to you from the outset. In its market research, GroupSync found that the following categories repeatedly came up on planners’ must-have checklists when evaluating potential destinations and venues:

• Room pricing
• Outdoor temperatures
• Specific amenities (e.g. a fitness center, onsite restaurants, etc.)
• Distance to the airport
• The availability of direct flights from your attendees’ top departing cities

For this reason, GroupSync lays out all these categories in a simple interface at the beginning of your search. You just have to input your preferences among the options — and if some aren’t relevant, you can skip them. To make things even easier, you can rank these requests in terms of importance.

Vet Venues Based on Pre-Calculated Meeting Space Needs

Meeting space requirements can be another major headache, particularly since different room layouts will require different space allotments for a given number of meeting participants. Wouldn’t it be great to know from the outset whether a venue will have the type of meeting rooms you’ll need, with the right amount of space in each?

GroupSync has found a solution here as well. You can indicate from the outset whether meeting space will be required, and if so, whether you’ll need breakout rooms, a ballroom, or an exhibit hall. A built-in calculator lets you know how much square footage you’ll need depending on attendance numbers and the seating arrangements you choose. All of this automation makes it easy to nail down your meeting space requirements from the outset — lowering the tedious legwork even further and reducing the need for repeat visits to check on the space once you’ve made your choice.

Let AI Do the Heavy Research for You

The system will then leverage massive data feeds and powerful algorithms to help you home in on the most suitable options and find the perfect fit for your event — leaving you free to dedicate your time to working your magic elsewhere. Suggested destinations are even given a score that shows how well they match your criteria.

“GroupSync has truly transformed our planning process and has been a bigger benefit than I ever could have anticipated,” says Jason Ferrill, admissions experience officer of the National Christian Counselors Association.

There are no paid placements, so you can rest easy knowing that the recommended destinations and venues really are the best available options for your event.

3. Skip the Small Talk: Don’t Waste Time Sending Mismatched RFPs

Ever sent out an RFP and waited a week for a response, only to find out that your dates are no longer available, or the pricing is out of your budget? With GroupSync you can save time on both sides of the equation by accessing all the information you need upfront. The GroupSync platform can streamline the RFP process at 203,783 hotels globally.

First, it enables you to browse details about meeting space and amenities and see both real-time availability and the best available group rates. Second, the platform also automatically generates RFP templates based on your search criteria, speeding up the process of getting the information you need even more.

The standard template covers the key questions, such as when you need the space and what type of space you’re looking for, and allows you to add multiple meeting space requirements. You can then also add food and beverage needs and requests, plus any other attachments drilling down into the specifics of your event.

Aside from saving your time, doing everything through the online platform helps to keep everything organized in one place. No more bouncing between emails, file-sharing services (like DropBox and Google Drive), paper print outs, and multiple hotel booking sites.

4. Hit Your Targets: Get a Faster Response from Venues

Traditionally, you might have had to work through a new RFP every time you approached a new property. But with GroupSync, you can send RFPs to multiple different properties at the same time – saving you the headache of going through the same process over and over again, as well as making it easier to compare answers like-for-like across properties.

Being able to reach more matching properties at once means you’re likely to find the right fit faster. This saves time for hotel sales staff as well. And since the GroupSync platform is fully intergrated with the booking systems of partner hotels, the venue’s sales team is able to skip several manual entry steps that they would normally need to take when reviewing RFPs. In turn, they’re able to respond that much faster.

“The entire team loves the way GroupSync simplifies and automates the process, which is saving them considerable time,” explains Norman Leong, director of reservations for Swissotel the Stamford & Fairmont Singapore.

5. Get Simple Sign Off: Easy Price Comparisons Your Executives Will Love

Inflation and price rises mean that companies everywhere are tightening their belts — and that meeting planners are under ever more pressure to show that they’re spending their budgets wisely and securing the best deals for the company.

GroupSync’s comparison tool, GroupSync Insight, uses AI to calculate the best windows for booking, even taking into account which lead times are likely to get you the best rates. In keeping, it will warn you if you’re sourcing your venue outside the optimal range, so you can consider whether to shift your dates to secure top savings.

To help you find the information you need to impress your company executives, GroupSync also sifts through a wealth of data to evaluate average hotel rates in each destination based on the time of year. You can access all of this data on pricing and occupancy rates in easy-to-read charts to help you evaluate whether properties are charging above or below the norm — and how likely they are to sell out. This information is not only handy for gauging how early you’ll need to nail down a contract, but is also valuable context for contract negotiation purposes.

To show you’ve really done your homework, you can browse other nearby venues to compare real-time group rates. This can help you spotlight properties or geographical areas you might not otherwise have considered, but which represent a better deal for you and your company.

Cost-Saving Tools

Want a little extra from your booking? There’s also an option to filter venues by those offering incentives, as well as instantly apply rewards or loyalty programs, such as Marriott’s Bonvoy points, to make the deal a little sweeter. Plus, you can use your account as an automated record of your company event spend. Bases covered!

“GroupSync has been such a tremendous help for us,” says Craig Keilitz, executive director of the American Baseball Coaches Association. “I can’t imagine doing business like we have over the last few years without it. It’s been absolutely incredible, and it’s saved us money.”

Visit Groups360 now to request log-in credentials and begin saving time using the GroupSync service free of charge.

As published by BizBash

Upgrade your booking methods, accelerate your process and reclaim your time

It’s an exciting time to be in the meetings and events industry as in-person gatherings continue to pick up speed.

How many group events or meetings are you currently planning? Probably more than you care to count—and with lead times that keep shrinking.

That’s why your planning process needs to keep up with your workload. To take more on and to get it done faster, planning efficiency is key—especially when sourcing and booking hotels.

Here are three ways to supercharge your meeting planning and regain valuable time.

1. Upgrade your sourcing methods

Are you still relying on search engines, online venue directories, individual hotel websites or word of mouth to find a meeting venue?

Traditional methods can take months of wading through overwhelming amounts of information. For busy meeting planners and travel organizers, these outdated approaches simply take too long.

Even after the arrival of digital RFPs, planners have had to fill out extensive entries into expensive legacy sourcing systems, only to receive results populated with paid placements irrelevant to your program.

GroupSync™ accelerates your search by providing a curated list of destinations and properties that fit your needs.

Sourcing on GroupSync will shave weeks, even months, off the time it takes to book your group rooms and meeting space, allowing you to focus on creating a fantastic attendee experience.

What’s more, GroupSync is free to use for travel organizers and planners.

 Get your free GroupSync account now >>

2. Send more strategic RFPs

For years, planners have had to send rounds of RFPs just to verify pricing and availability—and then wait for hotels to (hopefully) respond.

You can fast-track your booking process by strategically selecting hotels on the GroupSync Marketplace. GroupSync helps you find destinations and hotels that fit best with your program, within your budget.

No more phone tag and endless emails in search of what you need to make an informed decision. You can easily craft a single RFP to send to your ideal hotels selected from over 200,000 properties worldwide on GroupSync.

3. Book groups instantly online

Imagine how much faster your planning process would be if you could skip the RFPs altogether.

With GroupSync Instant Booking, you can now book room blocks, meeting space or both in a single online purchase, 24/7.

Ideal for smaller, simpler meetings, GroupSync Instant Booking gives you access to live rates and inventory at nearly 9,000 hotels worldwide.

Speed up your planning process by booking your next hotel on GroupSync—the technology changing the way the industry books groups.

Don’t miss out!
Instant Booking for Marriott’s portfolio of hotels across the United States and Canada has launched on GroupSync.

To celebrate, Marriott International is giving away 1 million Marriott Bonvoy® points to planners who book Marriott properties on GroupSync. Enter now for your chance to win, click here for details.

To sign up for a FREE GroupSync account, visit groupsync.com/register.

As published by BTN

The rapid evolution of business meetings and events has motivated planners to seek out technology to help them adapt to the changes.

For decades, meeting planners have expressed frustration with the longstanding hotel RFP process for booking groups. And the earliest digital RFPs simply sped up an already cumbersome process, rather than rethinking it altogether.

As hospitality industry veterans, the Groups360 team has been both behind and in front of the hotel check-in desk. We created GroupSync™ to provide a better, faster, more targeted way for meeting organizers to search, source and book hotel rooms and meeting space.

Create a Standout RFP

One of the primary advantages of the GroupSync Marketplace is its proprietary algorithm, designed to match you with destinations and properties that align with your specific needs and preferences. Your search starts by inputting your ideal destination, event dates, room count, average daily room rate, meeting space requirements and distance from airports, as well as preferred hotel brands and amenities.

From among more than 200,000 properties around the world, GroupSync search results include only properties that can accommodate your group. Destinations and hotels are also scored according to how well they align with your needs and preferences. And unlike legacy systems, there are no paid placements—only properties that can accommodate your group based on your criteria.

GroupSync search results also highlight properties with incentives that align with your program, as well as those with need dates that might give you a price advantage on room rates. The detailed, well-informed RFPs you produce on GroupSync can lead to faster, better responses from hotels and frees you to focus on what matters most—your event.

Book Rooms and Space Instantly Online

Instant Booking allows planners to book room blocks, meeting space or both, as well as A/V, F&B and more, in a single online purchase on GroupSync.

Ideal for the smaller, simpler meetings currently driving the industry’s recovery, GroupSync Instant Booking connects meeting organizers to 1 million available rooms—soon to be 3 million—at 20,000 leading hotels. In 2023, meeting space will be available for booking at thousands of properties.

Customized search results display which of the preselected hotels offer Instant Booking, and planner login credentials reflect group rates previously negotiated with your preferred hotels.

GroupSync’s live hotel room inventory—from Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Omni, as well as a growing number of other leading brands—can also inform your sourcing process so you can know before submitting an RFP if a hotel can accommodate your room block.

The most innovative technology companies don’t simply digitize existing processes—they reimagine a better way to do business. 

Get Ready to Hit the Road

According to recent surveys, 80% of planners intend to prioritize in-person events once it’s safe to do so, and 72% of hybrid meeting attendees believe they’ll get more value from the in-person experience. And 68% of planners for B2B marketing events say face-to-face interaction generates more leads.

Professionals agree that conventions, conferences and client meetings are best experienced face-to-face. Nothing can replace the enthusiasm, interpersonal connections, new business opportunities or increased ROI of an in-person gathering.

That’s why Groups360 is dedicated to empowering meeting planners to bring people together more easily, more effectively and more often.

Marriott International is giving away 1 million Bonvoy points—get started with a free GroupSync account >