Bigger group bookings bode well for resorts

Professional meeting planners, who have been deferring, cancelling or drastically cutting back on both size and frequency of meetings for more than a year now, are scheduling more site inspections and booking much larger groups for 2011 and 2012. This was confirmed during a long interview conducted this month with John Washko, VP sales & marketing, The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Washko is seeing three recent trends:

    * more organizations are giving a green light for future meetings;
    * The Broadmoor is converting more and more smaller groups (less than 150-room peak night), and
    * groups booking for 2011 and 2012 have much larger room blocks.

“We’re seeing a definite ‘uptick’ in site inspections and that tells us that more organizations are putting some real skin in the game—a very positive sign,” Washko added.

The size of meetings is increasing, according to Washko.

“A number of corporate groups in 2009 that were 75 to 95 peak roomnights are now up to 150 peak,” he said. “We find association groups getting bigger, corporate groups remaining smaller.”

2010 is “performing better than plan,” according to Washko. “There’s much better production in year and future years, but not back to those heavy demand levels of ’07 and our record year of ’08, while bookings overall for 2011 are fairly robust.”

Washko predicts booking pace will only increase with more sense of urgency on the part of the planner.

“Compression is starting to build,” he said. “Groups are now faced with having to sacrifice first choice of dates and hotels due, in part, to this new compression.”

Washko acknowledged his resort experienced a huge downturn in demand at the start of the fourth quarter 2008 and carrying over throughout 2009.

“We had multiple cancellations in year for 2009 and for our future pipeline,” he said.

Face time

I asked Washko how The Broadmoor sales team adapted or even changed deployment in the wake of that demand downturn. He said that one tactical change involved removing a sales manager from a geographical market with a lower yield and placing the sales manager full time in the Denver metropolitan market as a specialist with responsibility for group, social and public relations.

The results of that redeployment decision have been very good. Thanks to local networking, the specialist uncovered and then embedded a large organization of high-end women in business that booked a very high-visibility charitable event at The Broadmoor this summer.

“We cannot ever discount making a face-to-face connection,” Washko said.

A much bolder tactical step was the launching of the “Meetings Guarantee” program in early 2009. The Broadmoor announced if any meeting, conference, corporate retreat or incentive program booked through 2011 that failed to meet expectations “in terms of value, service, facilities and quality,” the master account would be waived.

I asked Washko how that program was working out for the resort.

“So far it has created numerous definites for ’09 and ’10,” he said. “Our culture allows us to commit to this program. Meeting planners are asking questions they never used to ask (prior to booking), e.g., staffing and training programs ’09 versus ’10, will (food-and-beverage) outlets be open during our meeting?”

While many heavily leveraged, cash-short and cost-cutting resorts might have cut back on training programs and staffing levels, and closed down or limited outlet operating hours, The Broadmoor has maintained its consistency of product delivery.

“We’re not just a balance sheet for the owners,” Washko said. “Our owners have an emotional attachment and are intensely proud of this resort.”