Throughout this series we’ve highlighted tips to help you narrow down your list of potential venues and given guidance on information to provide in your RFPs in order to get your RFP to the top of the hotels’ stacks. If you’ve followed these tips, you should have a handful of qualified options and detailed responses to help you choose the right venue for your meeting. Ultimately, the right venue for your meeting will be based on a variety of factors: price, location, food, meeting or sleeping room availability, the relationship with a property, etc. The right combination of factors may be different for each meeting. For example, an internal breakfast meeting might be fine at the lowest priced option that fits all of your audio-visual requirements. A client breakfast meeting, on the other hand, may be better placed the venue with the better breakfast menu, even if it’s slightly more expensive. Keep your audience in mind; while cost is always a priority, so is delivering an effective meeting that your attendees remember. Fortunately with the Cvent Supplier Network, comparing venues is an easy task! Cvent’s View Bids Report allows you to compare the RFP responses of two or more suppliers side-by-side. With this report, you are able to customize the information returned, including general hotel information, meeting space, F&B requirements, audio-visual details and additional questions. This allows you to create a custom view of the items that matter to you in your decision process. Additionally, this report can be exported to Excel and shared with other meeting stakeholders. In addition to choosing the right venue on a meeting-by-meeting basis, the Cvent Supplier Network helps you analyze data across your events to choose a venue based on your long-term relationship. Reports in the system can help you track your usage of preferred properties as well as the amount of business and total spend at the chain, brand, or property levels. This type of information can be helpful in choosing to revisit a specific property, and it will also be helpful in the negotiation process to secure an even better deal with your chosen property. As you make a decision on what property choose, don’t forget to award your RFP in the Cvent Supplier Network!
