Travelmole Guest Comment: BSI MD examines booking trends for the accommodation and meetings market
BSI group managing director Trevor Elswood examines the stark reality of the year ahead for the accommodation and meetings market with a direct comparison of January 2009 booking trends against January 2008.
Accommodation
Compliance to preferred hotel booking programmes and company policy has increased 5.8%, reflecting harder policy measures and communication by customers looking to reduce their costs through leveraging their spend with preferred suppliers.
Average rates have fallen significantly, primarily through best rate buying and access to the wide range of special rates that are being accessed outside the GDS. This has led to 19% of customer rates being undercut by BSI’s rate searches, against 2008 levels.
The figures show a dramatic increase of 8% in the number of rates booked now including full breakfast, again reflecting additional added-value services and reduction in the total cost of stay calculation.
Customer stay length has decreased by over 4% sitting at around 1.86 nights. However, BSI has seen a significant upsurge in demand for apartments and long stay accommodation through its specialist apartment brand Abode, with demand year on year increasing by over 75%.
Meetings and Events
The average number of delegates attending an external meeting is up 23%. An odd trend at first glance in an environment where corporations are looking for cost reduction – but as BSI focuses upon implementation of technology and authorisation processes, to optimise internal meeting space, we are seeing a robust move for clients, in both policy and processes in the use of internal meetings space, over and above external venues.
The average 24-hour residential delegate rate has reduced by 14.8% across the UK and the average daily delegate rate has reduced by 8.9% – both signifying a softening of demand and the ability to leverage buying demand.
The length of the meeting has remained pretty much consistent year on year but lead times have moved dramatically with over 72% now being booked within 40 days of the event, compared to 61% a year ago. However the levels of ‘speculative’ meeting planning requests has fallen, resulting in a far greater conversion ratio due to pre-authorised and shorter lead time bookings.
Again, opportunity beckons to the meeting organiser to drive better value. One key trend is the continual pricing gap between Monday and Friday meetings compared to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday meetings, with data highlighting a 31% price reduction on the softer Monday and Friday meetings.
Third party audio-visual programmes provide better rates in 72% of instances, than the venues providing in house Audio Visual themselves (where they are not offered as a complimentary service).
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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