This feature will give you the ability to include upfront markups collected directly from guests, while negotiating lower overall room costs. By working collaboratively with your hotel partners, this feature can expedite your cash flow, decrease the workload of reconciliation for all involved, and ensure your guests pay the lowest possible room rate.
To expand upon those benefits:
- Generate upfront revenue from your guests at the time of checkout.
- While revenue is traditionally collected as rebates and commission post-event, Upfront Markups can be adjusted to collect that revenue fully upfront or as a hybrid of Upfront Markups and post-event rebates/commissions. This does not mean that guests will be paying more for their room, but that a portion of the cost may be due upfront at the time of booking that would traditionally be transferred to the hotel and then paid out to you in reconciliation.
- Within the workflow, hotel partners are guided to quote their best publicly available rate, taking into account markups to ensure a competitive rate for your room blocks.
- By guiding the hotel partners to take into account hotel markups and the best publicly available rates as part of their RFP response, this feature will aim to provide rates for guests that will be on par with rates from other public sources.
- This workflow is a win-win for both you and hotel partners, as you avoid the back-and-forth reconciliation process post-event.
- If Upfront Markups are used in lieu of traditional rebates and commission, the reconciliation process can be entirely eliminated or simply scaled back. Eliminating or limiting that process through Upfront Markups provides a time savings for all involved.
- You are able to pay your event partners faster.
- By receiving the funds upfront, you will find a competitive advantage against your competitors by paying your event partners out more quickly.
- Upfront Markups provides flexibility to be increased or decreased even after contracting.
- Post contracting you will maintain the ability to adjust markups directly on your room blocks. By decreasing the markup, you can encourage guests to book at a specific hotel partner’s property. By increasing the markup, you can adjust for fluctuations in the cost of publicly available rates to maximize revenue.
- Upfront Markups can be used in conjunction with traditional rebates and commissions to maximize flexibility. If your hotel partners prefer a specific configuration, any combination of upfront markups (flat or percentage) and rebates/commission will be available to you.
Upfront Markup Workflow
In order to take advantage of this product, first you will need to ensure that it is enabled in your company settings.
During the contracting workflow, you will set the markup values while creating an RFP.
These markup values will be presented to the hotel user as part of each room block. The hotel user will first be required to enter the best available rate (BAR) into the room block rate calculator. This will calculate for them the maximum rate that can be entered to keep the rate competitive against other publicly available rates when taking into account markups. Depending on how you’ve set the Room Rate Plus Markup Under BAR Required setting, you can require a hotel to meet the BAR, or allow them to submit the proposal even above BAR.
Once the proposal is submitted to you, you have an opportunity to adjust the markups if needed and convert the proposal into a contract.
Event Hotels will show this markup and BAR information in the room block grid. The markups will be reflected in the total rate column. The markups can be adjusted as needed, and can continually be compared to the BAR that the hotel provided during the contracting workflow.
From the guest’s perspective, they will be made aware only of the Total Rate, which makes it easy to understand that they’re getting a competitive rate when compared against any publicly available resources. In the reservation policy details, a line will be added outlining what portion of the reservation is due at the time of booking, representing the markup amount. The guest will see only one charge on their form of payment regardless of any fees that may be separate from the markup amounts.
You may want to consider markups as automatically refundable since they represent part of the cost of a room. If so, you have the ability to configure this in your company settings. It can then be altered at the event and hotel level for specific cases. Refunds can also be initiated in Stripe on a case by case basis, but these settings allow for across the board automatic markup refunds due to canceled or modified reservations. The Event Refund Policy Details will appear in the Reservation Policies for guests during checkout, and on their email confirmation.
