Managing Room Blocks for Seminar Success
Budd Larner, a long-standing law firm in New Jersey, operates several practice areas that require year-round marketing events. To successfully market the practice area of software licensing, Chief Operating Officer Mitchell Rait and his Events team use several seminar each year to meet with various companies and clients. Hosted in major cities like Las Vegas, New York, and Chicago, these seminars are geared towards disseminating educational content for fellow lawyers, CIO’s, software contract professionals, and other industry experts. Up to 100 attendees travel from across the US and internationally for an average three night stay. As such, Mitchell’s team needed a technology solution to help manage room blocks and seamlessly connect rooming lists with registration data.
Wasting Time and Money on Manual Processes
Over the span of fifteen years, Mitchell and his team created a well-established seminar program. However, they often struggled with difficult manual processes in managing room blocks for attendees. “It was horrible,” he explains. “You had to rely on the hotels and ask them to periodically send you reports for the rooming lists.” This caused backlogs in the team’s workflow and even affected the overall event budget. “We had room blocks that weren’t filled, and possible attrition because we didn’t know to remind people to book their rooms. They would either go somewhere else or forget to book it all together,” notes Mitchell.
Using Cvent Event Management software ensured a seamless registration experience for attendees, but the inability of data to flow between the manual room lists and Cvent created significant information gaps. “We always knew through Cvent who was registered for the seminar itself, but we always struggled with simultaneously knowing who was staying at the hotel. There was always a disconnect in that data,” Mitchell adds.
A Positive Passkey Experience
Even though they have been hosting seminars for fifteen years, Mitchell notes that the last five years of using Cvent Passkey has been revolutionary. “The first time we used Passkey was eye-opening,” he explains. “We have a link to the registration page for attendees to book rooms, which connects on the backend so we can see who is registering.” The clarity that Passkey provides helps Mitchell’s team accurately ensure room blocks are filled and data is always up-to-date.
“Now, with Passkey, we can match up who registered for the seminar on the one hand, and on the other, we can see who has registered in our room block,” he explains. If they haven’t completed their booking, Mitchell’s team can use email marketing to target registered attendees and encourage them to book their room. He notes, “We can send them an automated email to complete the booking and sure enough, it works.”
Using Data to Manage Event Expectations
Passkey provides Mitchell’s team the data they need to ensure the success of their seminars. “You can get all kinds of reports from Passkey,” he explains. “I use that data to manage future events. It’s always a game of how many people you expect for the seminar, and how many rooms you want to commit to. You don’t want to have too little rooms so your attendees can’t take advantage of your room block, but you don’t want to guarantee too many rooms you may not fill.”
To ensure his team doesn’t overestimate their numbers or burden themselves with needless costs, Mitchell’s team uses on-demand rooming lists provided through Passkey. “We definitely spend less time now than we did before on the whole process,” he says. Rather than having to communicate back and forth with hotels in search of updated rooming lists, the dashboard easily displays updated rooming information. They also leverage automated alerts to make sure the team can stay on top of the data. “You are able to login to Passkey at any given time and get your data,” Mitchell explains. “You click a couple of buttons and bam! It’s right on the dashboard.”
Seeing the Benefits Pay Off
Mitchell’s team has seen the full effect of using Passkey over the last five years. With the added time savings and elimination of manual processes coordinating with the hotels for rooming lists, his team can focus on other tasks to ensure an even better event experience for attendees. “Time savings are key,” notes Mitchell. “The reports are very easy to use. You can download them to Excel, you can manipulate the data, and you can send out email blasts. It’s all right there for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re having a seminar for twenty or a thousand people, it still works the same.”
Mitchell averages a time savings of nearly 50% in using Passkey to manage bookings. This provides an average savings of thousands of dollars each year in manual labor and nearly non-existent attrition rates. The team has experienced so much success with the tool that they now look for Passkey as an integral component of their venue sourcing. “Whenever I shop around for hotels, I try to make sure they have Passkey and it’s available for use,” he adds. The overall ease of process he has experienced makes the use of Passkey a natural fit for the numerous seminars his team manages each year. “Passkey prompts us to get those people to their sleeping rooms so we always meet our guarantee and don’t have penalties,” he explains. “It saves money, time, and labor on the Events team. We very rarely, if ever, experience attrition in not filling our rooms.”
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