Strengthening Your Next Meeting Contract by Starting Site Selection and Contract Negotiations Early
Meeting and event planners are navigating a more complex environment than they were just a few years ago. In addition to greater economic uncertainty and rising costs, a Meetings Today survey found that nearly 90% of planners have found contract negotiations more challenging than they did just two years ago, from reaching agreements around attribution allowances to settling on AV terms.
While no one can predict every variable that could affect your planning or the final event, there is one factor you can control: when you begin. The earlier you start exploring venues and negotiating your contract, the more opportunities you have to make strategic decisions, compare your options, and build flexibility into your agreements.
Why start early?
Site selection and hotel contracts are among the first and largest financial commitments an organization will make for a conference or event, and the timelines for both are getting longer.
General guidance is to start your planning at least 2-3 years before an event, but many planners are expanding their timelines for researching venues and sending out RFPs to 5-8years in advance. These longer lead-times open more location opportunities, but they also allow for greater leverage and time for negotiations.
Here are four ways that starting early can strengthen your next meeting contract:
Exploring before you commit
Attendees’ expectations for events are changing – they’re looking for more personalized and engaging experiences. Post-event or member surveys can shed light on what your audience is looking for:
o What aspects of the meeting matter most to them?
o What kinds of programming have been most beneficial?
o What kinds of environments best support their goals, whether it’s networking, education, or engagement?
To help meet their changing needs, planners are increasingly looking beyond hotel conference rooms, bringing the attendee experience into restaurants, cultural spaces, and art galleries to build engagement. Starting earlier gives you the opportunity to consider different types of venue, destination, or event environments that could best align with the goals of your attendees and organization.
If you’re weighing your options, an experienced third-party meeting professional with established relationships and knowledge of venues and destinations can help you narrow down your choices and settle on locations or venues that best align with your needs.
Comparing before you choose
Once you've identified potential venues, starting early gives you more time to evaluate and create a meaningful comparison between potential options that takes your full financial and operational picture into account.
Key variables include:
Room rates and projected increases
Attrition and room-block requirements
Meeting-room rental and space commitments
Food and beverage minimums and pricing
Audio-visual and technology costs
Service charges and other fees
Staffing and labor requirements
Complimentary rooms and other concessions
Accessibility and attendee experience
Transportation and location
Looking at these factors side by side can reveal significant differences between proposals that might initially appear comparable. It also allows you to ask questions, request clarifications, revisit assumptions, and understand what you're committing to before you start to negotiate.
Negotiating before you’re under pressure
When you have months/years to work through a contract, you're also in a better position to negotiate without the pressure of a tight deadline.
And in today’s economic environment, that flexibility is key. As costs and market conditions shift, contracts with variable pricing – rather than fixed rates – allow you and the venue to work together to scale resources up or down based on changing event attendance, adjusting milestones, market shifts, or other unexpected events.
Costs are likely to change, especially with longer lead-times. But when you start the process earlier, you have greater leverage to negotiate around how and when those costs adjust.
Starting early to negotiate strategically
There will always be things you can't control when planning a meeting. And in today’s world, it seems that the ordinary unknowns associated with any event – natural attrition, unpredictable weather, venue challenges – are being met with another level of unpredictability.
As organizations and associations continue to innovate and elevate the ways they deliver value to their members and key audiences, events continue to play a critical and strategic role.
Starting that planning earlier – even in the face of uncertainty – allows meetings and events teams to get built in greater flexibility and leverage to position themselves for whatever comes next.
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