Hotel room attrition is a stressful and expensive problem that has plagued the meetings and events industry for decades. While plenty of best practices and strategies have been established over the years to mitigate room attrition, the industry still spends an estimated $21 billion a year on empty hotel rooms worldwide. That’s why meeting and event professionals are ecstatic about the recent launch of RoomRite – the leading resale marketplace for group hotel accommodations.
“We built the StubHub of room blocks; allowing planners to sell off rooms they no longer need, while giving other groups the ability to access rates and rooms on relatively short notice,” said Michael Weiss, CEO of RoomRite. “In today’s market, where there is limited room inventory available and less flexibility with contract negotiations, there could not be a better time for a secondary marketplace for room blocks.”
Events struggling to fill their contracted room block can list their excess hotel rooms 60 to 120 days prior to their event on RoomRite’s proprietary resale marketplace, where other groups can book a minimum of 10 rooms from a listing at the selling party’s contracted rate. Rooms sold on RoomRite count toward the selling party’s room pick up, while the buying party enjoys significant cost savings and access to room inventory that is otherwise considered unavailable; which is particularly helpful when looking to book a block of rooms within a popular market on relatively short notice.
There is no cost to create an account or to list rooms for sale. However, RoomRite does charge the selling party 15% of the rooms sold; but if the choice is to pay the hotel $10,000 for empty rooms or $1,500 to avoid those attrition fees, RoomRite is the better decision.
RoomRite also offers a free room attrition calculator to help meeting & event professionals assess their options for reselling their rooms.
Some meeting and event professionals may be wondering if reselling rooms on RoomRite is even an option, given No Resale clauses and legal language in their contract. RoomRite never publishes a resale listing with first obtaining approval from the hotel.
“Hotels are always included in the reselling decision and there will be times where the hotel says ‘no’ to us,” said Weiss. “However, RoomRite offers hotels several benefits, such as the ability to add a minimum hotel F&B requirement to the buying party, that incentivizes hotels to ‘yes’ to reselling.”
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Author: Sam Hyland
Sam is the assistant content manager for Event Industry News (EIN). Sam is involved in publishing news stories, videos and podcasts. Sam also collates the latest stories for the EIN e-newsletter. If you have a press release or story you think we might be interested to know about please email editor@eventindustrynews.com
