Recording Transcript:

Kate:

Of course, what are hotel negotiated rates? When people think about contracted rates at hotels, a lot of things that come to mind are more around the group sales side, so maybe a company event, on the personal side if you’re booking a wedding, family reunions, different things like that. Hotels do have a really big focus on business travel though, so they offer negotiated rates to companies that reach those thresholds. Hotels will look at how many nights your company will be bringing into their market, as well as into their exact property. So by setting up a negotiated rate with your company, the hotel is able to of course capture the majority, if not all of your room nights into their city, and then it’s not pushing over to their competitors. So it’s really a win-win, you all will get a really great rate, and then they’re getting your business.

Each hotel is a little bit different as far as what their thresholds look like. So if you’re traveling to a really big city like New York, they might require a couple hundred room nights a year in order to get a negotiated rate. So that’s something you always want to ask when you are discussing this with them, what their threshold is. If you’re traveling to a smaller city or a town, then they might only require 50 room nights a year. So it’s very, very dependent on the property. That’s one big thing that you really want to make sure you understand is how many room nights they are going to require.

A couple of the terms that you are going to start hearing when you’re talking to these hotels too, and what you really want to understand, is first on this left-hand side you’re going to hear last room available or non-last room available. This is going to be part of your contract with the hotel. What last room available means, is your rate will stay open until the hotel is sold out. So even if there’s one room left, they will make your rate available. Of course, this can make your rate a little bit higher just because it will always be available to you.

The non-last room available rates sometimes will be a little bit lower, but of course since it’s non-last room available, even if they are at say 60, 70% occupancy, they could still shut off your rate. The hotel might do that if the public rate is much higher than the rate that you have negotiated, of course just to get more revenue into the hotel. So you really want to understand when you are talking to these hotels to get negotiated rates, what would the rate look like if you went last from available, and what would the rate look like if you went non-last room available? This will also include blackout dates, so you want to understand if there are some. Using New York again, for example, Fashion Week, that’s typically a very big blackout week for hotels to not have these rates available. So understanding what the blackout dates would look like, it’s usually surrounded around conferences or big events like that.

The other thing you really want to understand too is the static versus dynamic rate. There’s pros and cons to both of these, it would really just depend what you and your company want to have. A static rate, it will be that set dollar amount, but hotels typically have highs and low seasons, so you may see four or five different seasons in your contract. So say your low seasons are $250 a night, and then your high season could be $350 a night. This is taking into consideration of course when the very busy places that people are traveling to in the summer, that’s going to be a high season. Versus maybe people don’t want to be going to the very cold of Chicago in the winter, so that would be a low season. If you do have a static rate and you see different date ranges that the pricing changes, that’s just what it is, we have the highs and the low seasons.

The dynamic rate is going to be a percentage off the best available rate. Say the best available rate one night is $300 a night and your rate is 10% off, you’re going to get 10% off that $300. So the dynamic rate can be really helpful because you know that you’ll always be under the rate that’s available to the public. But of course, if the rate available to the public is super high, you are still going to be paying a premium if you are traveling at the high time. Versus the static rate, you know exactly what you’re going to be paying by the month, by the date, by the season, so you can really plan for your hotel cost with the static rate. That’s definitely the pro of that, but the pro of the dynamic, like I said, is going to make it so you are always paying less than that public rate since it will be a percentage off the best available rate.

Like I said, when you do talk to hotels to get these rates, these are the four things you’re really going to want to understand, and just make sure you ask about. So whatever’s going to work best for your company, whether that’s going to be last room available versus non-last room available, static rate versus dynamic rate.

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about what the negotiated rates are, and a few things to keep in mind, what does it look like To set these up? You’re first going to want to pick a city or even a specific property that your employees travel to frequently. Say you’re traveling to Charlotte, North Carolina, you might have another office there, so you have a lot of employees traveling. There might be one property that is right next door to your office that all of your employees are staying at. You would want to go directly to that property and say, “Hey, can we get a negotiated rate for our company here?” If people are going to a city and they’re staying at a couple different properties, then you can definitely talk to a couple of different properties if you don’t have one that everybody’s staying at. So just good to think about where your employees would… Where they typically stay, because then they’ll want to go exactly where they’ve already been used to.

Once you pick that city or property specific, you’re going to want to estimate the number of future hotel stays in that market. Of course, if this is a market that you’ve been traveling to frequently at your company, you’re going to have that historical data, and we’ll talk about how you can get that in TravelBank. But maybe you have a new project in that city, so maybe you signed a new contract in Dallas that you’re now going to have employees traveling to Dallas, and you would want to estimate the number of room nights you’d be having going into Dallas. So if your people are going to be traveling, you’re going to have 10 people traveling three nights a week, that’s the information that the hotel is going to want to know. Just an estimate of how many room nights they can expect.

Once you have these very two crucial pieces of information, where you want to get a rate and what the future is going to look like, contact the hotel sales office. Every hotel is of course set up a little bit differently. If they do have a business travel sales representative, that’s who you’re going to want to work with. But if you just call the hotel sales office and say, “Hey, I want to get a good negotiated rate for my company, we are bringing in X amount of room nights into your market in the next year,” they’ll get you in contact with the correct person. If it’s not a business travel sales representative, it will be one of their other sales reps, or maybe even their director of sales. But you definitely want to chat with the sales office versus the front office. They’ll probably direct you back to the sales office anyways. So have that really great conversation with the representative there, talking to them about what your rate’s going to look like.

They’ll have some questions for you, you’ll of course have some questions for them. Once you decide on that rate that you want to negotiate with them, that’s when you’ll sign the contract directly with the hotel. That contract will not be facilitated through TravelBank, you’ll want to work directly with the property so it is in your company name. And once that is signed is when TravelBank is going to start coming to get this loaded into your TravelBank account. So you’ll work with your TravelBank customer success manager. If you’re not sure who your customer success manager is, you can reach out. I’ll give you this email at the end as well, but success@travelbank.com. And what happens at this point is we would need to be looped into an email with your hotel rep. Saying, “TravelBank is our travel management company. We need to load our rate into their system so we can access it.”

From there, the TravelBank customer success manager will send over information that the hotel needs to be able to load this rate directly into their… So they can load the rate into the system so we can access it. Note that this can take anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks, it really depends on the hotel. Some hotels have their revenue rate loading team directly in-house. Some of them might use say Hilton or Marriott Corporate. So it just depends on where their rate loading team lives. Sometimes it might take two or three weeks, I’ve seen it done within the day, so it does vary. We are, unfortunately, at the mercy of the hotel just how quickly they get this done. I’ve personally seen that when the client, so you all, are the ones that introduce us to the hotel and loop us all in the same email, it gets done a little bit faster. That’s why I always like to suggest just getting us on the same email directly from you.

Once this rate is loaded in TravelBank, you’re all set to have your employees start booking it. If when you renegotiate at the end of the year with the hotel to get maybe a new rate for 2025, we will not have to go through the rate loading again, all of the codes and the information is going to stay the same, well, as long as the hotel doesn’t switch anything. They’ll just load the new rate in, it’s going to come over to us seamlessly. So we really just have to do that rate loaded one time.

As I mentioned before, in order to get that information as far as what your hotel bookings might look like, if you’re going to be using historical booking, you can do that directly in TravelBank. So whether you have Premium Insights or Core Insights, you’ll have access to this information. So you can see hotel spend by city, we’ll break down exactly how much you’ve spent in that city, what percentage of that has been your spend. A hotel might want to see exactly what’s gone into Dallas in the past. You’ll be able to select a specific date range, if maybe the previous quarter is when you’ve really started to have that uptick, be able to give them that information.

We also have this hotel bookings report, and this will show you exactly how much you’ve spent at that exact hotel and how many bookings that has been. Like I said, if you’re going off historical data to give to the hotel for the negotiated rates, I would recommend using the hotel bookings. So we would want to go to the Roxy and say, “Hey, we’ve already brought in 32 room nights in the last quarter. This is typical for us, so what can we do?”

What you’re really going to want to look at in these reports is of course total bookings and nights per market. You’re most frequently booked hotels within that market, so we can use it for negotiation. And then the average rate paid and the lowest base rate, you can use that as a benchmark of exactly what you’d be expecting to pay. You can say, “Hey, we’ve paid this in the past. This is right around what we would like our rate to look like.” So by having historical data like this in TravelBank, it’s going to give you so much more to go to the properties and give them this information, versus if you are not using TravelBank for travel, not having this information. This just gives you a lot stronger negotiation power, so I want to make sure everybody knows how to access this reporting.

Like I said, it’s in Core Insights and Premium Insights. In Core Insights it’s going to be under Travel Hotel List, and then you can break it down a little bit more by going into your Bookings and see your Hotel Spend by City. And then in Premium Insights, both of these are going to be living under your Booking Questions. The recording for this will go out, you will have these links, but this is just that quick way to get to those reports that you’ll need.

Now that we’ve gone over all the nitty-gritty of how to get these rates, how we’re going to get them in TravelBank, we can take a look at exactly what this looks like in TravelBank. Once you reach out to your customer success manager, we come back to you saying, “Hey, the rate’s been loaded. You’re good to go.” When you search your specific location and your dates, you’re going to start seeing this orange tag, and it will say your company name rate. These rates are going to populate up to the top of the search, so your travelers will always see these first. They’re going to know that you all have a negotiated rate at this property.

When we click in, it’ll say your company name instead of Demoland. Demoland is just the name of the account I’m logged into. It’ll say your company rate and it’ll show what the rate is, and it will give you of course the typical information you see. If you’re paying at the hotel, if it’s refundable, if it’s not. One of the biggest things to note here, we talked about this a little bit, but how if you go with non-last room available or there are blackout dates, this rate may not always be available. That is completely at the discretion of the hotel themselves, not TravelBank. So if you don’t see your rate available, as you can see, these rates down here are coming from different providers to TravelBank. So we’re not seeing Demoland rate, but people are still able to book it.

The benefit of this, of course, is maybe the public rate is a little bit lower on that night than your negotiated rate, which could happen from time to time. So they might want to book the lower rate. Or if they need a different room type that is not included in your negotiated rate, they’d be able to book that. This is one of those things that you really want to make sure the communication gets out to your employees to make sure that they’re booking the one that says your company name rate. Just because it’s tagged at the top here does not mean that every single rate that’s going to show up down here is going to be that negotiated rate.

We can see that with this Moxy here. We can see the company negotiated rate, but this rate is not available, and your rate’s available on the date. So we’re not seeing that Demoland rate tag at all. Like I said, just make sure you’re communicating that out to your travelers that just if they’re seeing that orange tag, the rates still may not be available. And once again, that’s at the discretion of the hotel, not TravelBank.

Let’s go ahead and very quick demo there, but just want you to know that this is something that we will always populate rate at the top for your travelers. I do see that we have a couple questions. Why does TravelBank need to see a client’s negotiated rate contract? If we see the contract, it gives us a really good picture into, one, what are those blackout dates? So if people are reaching out saying, “Hey, why is my rate not available? Is it loaded incorrectly?” We’ll know that those are the blackout dates. It just gives us a better picture of exactly what you have negotiated with the hotel. Whenever we load the rate into TravelBank as well, we of course test that rate before we confirm to you that it’s loaded correctly. So we want to make sure when we are testing it that we’re seeing exactly what the price should be for that night. So it’s just helpful for us to see the exact terms that you have negotiated.

Will my company get penalized if we don’t meet the estimated number of nights at the end of the contract period? This is of course a question you want to ask the hotel directly, just because the contracts will be going directly through them. From my personal experience, it can just make it a little bit harder to negotiate the next year if you are way under, but since this would be part of the contract with the hotel, just check with them directly. Considering hotel sellout often, should we negotiate rates with more than one hotel in a city? It can definitely be helpful to have more than one. Going back to that previous question though, that’s just something we would want to think about. If you are bringing, say 200 room nights into a city a year, but you have it spread across two different properties, you’re sharing a pretty big piece of the pie with two properties instead of pushing it all into one.

So we can get a little bit stronger negotiation power if you’re putting it all into one hotel. But yes, to your point, hotels do sellout often, so you do want to have a backup. That’s when the historical data can help you out a lot in TravelBank, just knowing how often people are staying at that hotel next to your office versus maybe they had to go across the street, just to be able to get a better understanding of when it’s been sold out. And that’s something you should of course talk to the hotel contact too about. They’ll be able to give you a little bit more information about what their sellouts look like. If you’re at say, non-last room available, how often they might have it closed out just so you can get a better understanding of, hey, if we’re bringing 100 room nights into your city, but you’re going to have our rate closed out 50% of the time, you’d probably want to have a backup.

Have you seen paid amenities included in the company rate, like wifi or breakfast? I’ve definitely seen this in some contracts, so definitely worth asking the hotel contact about. Wifi is definitely a big one, but typically if you’re a Marriott Bonvoy member you can get free wifi. Other ones that I’ve seen in contracts have been parking. If it’s a place that you’re going to have a car versus taking an Uber, Lyft, or taxi. So definitely good to ask and see what else you can get added in there.

Do hotels expect you to have a competing bid to share from another hotel? I don’t think that they expect you to have one. Of course, as is with any negotiation, it can help give you a little bit leverage. If you want to get competing bids, definitely something that you can do. But if there are instances where you know that everybody’s just going to stay at exactly the property next door to your office, a competing bid might not make sense because you know you’re going to get a rate there no matter what. And like I said, I don’t think that they expect you to have one, but it can be a good negotiation tool.

I think that’s all the questions so far. Of course, we have a little bit more time if there are more questions that pop up. Or if questions come up after, you can of course reach out to your own customer success manager, or email success@travelbank.com. If you have any questions about TravelBank in general, our support.travelbank.com website is our most frequently asked questions. So if you have any questions about booking hotels, what the different… We saw there’s a few different rates that pop up. Some might be loyalty eligible, some might not. All of that information will be in our support page. You can also email support@travelbank.com.

If you’re having any issues with hotel bookings, definitely just chat directly into our agents from the app. They are our 24/7 agents, so they’ll be able to help you out. And if you’re wondering, which I know is definitely a hot topic, product updates, we always want you to know what’s going on, what’s new in TravelBank. So if you go to TravelBank.com/whats-new, we will put in our monthly updates there. So anything travel related, expense related, you’ll be able to see directly on that website.

But thank you all so much for joining, and we are looking forward to having you all booking your hotels and travel through TravelBank.