As online bookings become second nature, a UK-based hotel group is looking to automate meeting bookings in a bid to drive new revenues.

The hotel industry continuously strive to strengthen its online booking capabilities but one area still lacking is live information about meeting room availability and pricing on hotel websites.

UK-based hotel group, Premier Inn, however, is attempting to drive income from meeting room bookings. The group chose Your Workspaces’Meetings Maker software (yes, a bit of a mouthful) to facilitate bookings of meeting rooms in real-time on a suppliers’ website. The software handles the complexities of managing meeting room enquiries, bookings, payments and amendments; in fact all services most hotels still perform manually.

The Meetings Maker system allows a user to search for a meeting room based on  - location, number of people, room layout, duration of meeting and catering. The system then provides a list of all rooms within the hotel that meet the customer’s requirements.

EyeforTravel.com’s Ritesh Gupta speaks to Keith Hudspith, Head of Food and Beverages at Premier Inn about implementing software which claims to be the first of its kind in the industry.

EFT: How do you assess the potential of real-time online booking software?

KH: Having witnessed the impact of online real-time booking on hotel rooms, we expect a  similar outcome with meeting rooms in the coming years.

If you have the chance to give a meeting room customer all the information they need to make a buying decision and the ability to book and pay immediately, then it’s a no-brainer.

EFT: Why did you choose to go ahead with this initiative?

KH: Once you accept that meetings are increasingly going to be booked online, you either go ahead and provide the service to your customers directly or wait for an intermediary to fill the gap. A large proportion of our bedrooms are booked directly so we wanted to implement the same direct booking system with our meeting rooms.

EFT: What factors did you take into consideration before launching an online bookings system for meetings?

KH: The main consideration was to implement the meeting room booking system without disrupting the functionality of our main bedroom booking system. Meeting Maker is a fully hosted service solution, which allowed us to bring up the meeting room system with zero impact on our main site.

EFT: What challenges did you encounter while working on this project?  

KH: One of the main challenges was to incorporate the latest technology such as MVVM without it clashing with the design theme of the core site. In the end, we managed to design the new meeting room pages to match Premier Inn’s existing site while offering an outstanding user experience.

EFT: Given the issues associated with automating the management of meeting room enquiries, bookings, payments and amendments, how does it fare on the e-commerce platform?

KH: For many hotel groups, the meetings business has not received as much attention as it could have. This is understandable as it usually represents a relatively small proportion of total revenue. The flipside is that there is often the potential to drive substantial incremental revenue from the meeting business. Tracking and recording each and every enquiry can be a challenge because enquires come from many different channels such as phone, email, web-form and walk-ins. We overcame this issue by working with Meetings Maker to establish a new twenty-four hour centralised enquiry handling centre and directing every enquiry into it.

All bookings are now handled by the system which has cut down booking time from hours to minutes.

Amending meetings has also become easier, regardless of how the booking was made. Whether a customer is booking directly online or through one of our call agents, the cost implication of the change is calculated immediately so the customer knows exactly how much it will cost.

The main challenge is ensuring consistency across the entire business in every location. This requires standardising our booking and business rules across a large network.

In terms of payments, we were able to introduce a fully PCI compliant process. The new rules around taking card payments over the phone were relatively easy to implement due to the new centralised booking centre. If anything, it was the customers that needed support with the new card payment processes.

EFT: How does Meetings Maker enhance customer experience?

KH: Providing an enhanced customer experience was the primary objective of implementing the software. We made sure of this by:

·           Providing the customer with access to all information on our meeting offerings 24 hours a day, all year round.

·          We also incorporated 24-hour phone support to ensure customers can talk to a real person at any time of the day or night.

·          Again, the new web pages use the latest map results software which allows the customer to see the number of locations that meet their requirements and then book the room as well as add the amenities they need with just few clicks.

·          Finally, we reorganised our standards and pricing to include the most commonly used additional items with every booking and provide a great value package. Currently, every room includes free multi-device WiFi, free still and sparkling bottled water plus flipcharts and pens.

EFT: In your opinion why don’t hotels generally offer live information on meeting room availability?

KH: It has been very difficult for hotels to offer online meeting booking because of the technical challenges associated with creating a booking system. Meeting bookings are much more complex than bedroom bookings because of the various rates. Also, requirements such as hourly, half daily and daily create hundreds of possible booking permutations. When these are then combined with all catering and equipment options you end up with thousands of permutations for each room. As far as we are aware, the new Meetings Maker system is the first to solve all these problems.