Businesses book hotel meeting spaces for a variety of different purposes. Here are some helpful tips on what to keep in mind when reserving hotel space for your own meeting.

As president of the Information Marketing Association, I host a monthly advice call for information marketers who have questions and are trying to launch their infopreneur business. This is a question from Scott in St. Louis, Missouri, about what he needs to consider when reserving hotel meeting space. Since this is a common question, I decided to prepare an article about this challenge to help you.

There are a couple of key issues where hotels are going to look for a waiver clause. Hotels are in the business of selling bedrooms, and while they do have meeting spaces in hotels, the only reason they have that meeting space is so they can sell bedrooms to people who attend meetings. As a promoter, we want their space guaranteeing as few rooms as possible, however they, as a hotel, want to give their meeting space only to people who reserve as much sleeping space as possible. When you get the contract or when you enter the discussion, the first thing they will ask you is, how much space do you need and how many rooms are you going to reserve? And based on that equation, they’ll figure out if they’ll give you any kind of discount on the rooms. And then when they give you the contract, they’re going to ask you to book a certain number of rooms. If you don’t reserve that number, then you are responsible for paying them for those rooms, whether or not someone sleeps in them. Then they will also ask you for a minimum of food and drink. This is the amount of food, coffee, lunch and the like that you buy that will be included in that original contract. Some of the provisions and then there is going to be a cancellation provision. That’s the third thing you really need to think about.

Now in terms of attrition, a couple of years ago it was hard to get a hotel contract without a really aggressive attrition penalty. Now that is less and less the case and I find that hotels are more open to negotiating those terms.

The other thing to consider is how much food and beverage the hotel will require you to purchase in order to use the hotel’s meeting space. What surprises most people is when you buy, say, $5,000.00 worth of food and beverages, that’s plus service charge plus sales tax. That’s like another twenty-eight percent you’ll have to pay on top of that. If you look at the contract and think, “Okay, five thousand dollars worth of food and beverages will be great. That’s all I have to spend. That’s my budget.” Well, that five thousand is actually a minimum of five thousand food and beverage plus tax plus tip, so it ends up being closer to $6,500.00.