The Art of Room Blocks

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What to do in advance and in the moment to meet your room block budget

It seems simple. Book a block of rooms for meeting attendees based on the number of people and the times of the meetings. Just follow the formula, right? Not quite.

Multiple variables can make this seemingly easy task quite complicated. For example, does everyone sign up with enough advance notice to meet the hotel’s deadline? What about the people who want to book a different hotel and just show up for the conference itself. And then there are people who want to come early, or leave early, or stay late.

When it comes to room blocks, there is no simple formula to follow.

Two Tips to Break Down Barriers to Booking

Let’s focus first on the conference attendees. How do you break through barriers—which are primarily behavior-based—to encourage on-time registration?

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Incent the desired behavior with savings: If there’s a fee to attend, consider offering a discount to those who reserve within the block. Or, offer a joint conference/hotel fee that provides an overall discount versus booking separately.

Motivate with swag: If there isn’t a fee, offer some free meeting swag for those who book. (Just make sure it’s unique and not something they can get just by showing up anyway!)

And if those don’t work and registration/rooms booked remains lower than anticipated, see what ancillary meetings can be booked in existing meeting space to help drive attendance.

Seven Tips to Minimize the Cost of Attrition

If you manage to book the block successfully, you still need a strategy to avoid busting your budget by not meeting your room block minimum.

In advance:

1. When setting up the contract, make sure it measures attrition on a cumulative basis versus per-night basis.
2. Another contract solution is to ask for the option for the hotel to resell any unused rooms to lessen the attrition, if applicable.
3. Open registration as early as possible. Carefully review the block at each date where rooms can be released and adjust accordingly.
4. Set up the contract to allow for a post-meeting audit. This catches any rooms that were booked by meeting attendees outside of the room block.

As soon as you know meeting registration is not meeting original forecasts:

1. Negotiate with the hotel to release back some meeting space (if possible). If the hotel is willing and able to resell some meeting space with a small block of rooms, this can lessen some of the attrition.
2. See what the same venue would give you for booking again for the next year. One of our clients has seen success with this activity.
3. Ask if food and beverage spend above the contracted minimum could count toward the room block minimum. We had a long-time client who often spent three times the F&B minimum. While this company’s attrition was usually minimal, if any, we negotiated attrition off of the final bill due to the large amount of F&B spent over the contractual minimum.

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Melissa McCray, Bishop-McCann strategic account manager, is a marketing and meeting industry professional with more than 25 years of experience in operations, finance, process improvement and project management.

This article appears in the May/June 2023 issue. You can subscribe to the magazine here.