Hotel RFP response: why speed and quality win the booking

Every meeting planner who sends a hotel RFP is waiting for two things: a fast answer and an offer that fits the event. Many conference hotels deliver neither. Requests pile up in shared inboxes, offers go out days later, and the proposal often misses what the client actually asked for. The result is lost group business that never shows up in any report, because nobody tracked the request in the first place.

Why so many meeting requests go unanswered

Bernd Fritzges, Managing Partner at a company that supports hotels in convention and group sales, has spent some 20 years in the MICE market (meetings, incentives, conventions and events), mostly on the side of corporate buyers. He cites studies that value it at up to 140 billion euros in Germany alone.

Yet hotels respond weakly to this demand. His team evaluates offer time and offer quality every six months in a benchmark report. According to his figures for the German market, only 8 percent of hotels manage to send a qualified offer within 24 hours. Even more striking: 36 percent of the requests that reach a hotel are never handled at all. No offer, not even a reply saying there is no capacity.

He sees two causes behind this:

• A shortage of skilled staff. Handling event requests takes real know-how. If a pharmaceutical company asks for a quote, the person replying needs to understand the pharma code of conduct.
• Cost pressure. Hotels are pushed to become more productive and try to absorb that with technology, often on top of systems that do not talk to each other.

When his company onboarded its first hotel, a chain property in Hamburg, the sales inbox held more than 1,000 unread emails with event requests, all unprocessed. Simple fixes for hotel lead generation start with that inbox.

Speed or quality: what wins a hotel RFP

Fritzges warns against treating response time as the only metric. Speed matters a great deal, but a fast reply is useless if the offer does not match the client's need. What converts is the combination of both.

“Das heißt also, die Qualität in der Bedarfsanalyse und die Qualität des Angebotes ist auch sehr wichtig, kombiniert mit Schnelligkeit und das gibt den conversion Boost.”

Bernd Fritzges, 12:41

(Translated: “In other words, the quality of the needs analysis and the quality of the offer also matter a lot, combined with speed, and that gives you the conversion boost.”)

His company guarantees a qualified offer within 24 hours, which he describes as the standard expectation in the MICE market, and it works to stricter internal targets. With that approach, he says, they can show conversion rates of up to double, along with higher client satisfaction.

What makes a meeting offer stand out

The key factors are simple once you take the point of view of the person placing the request. That person wants to feel, from the very first contact, that the event is in good hands. Specialists in destination management for VIP clients build trust the same way.

• A real needs analysis. Pick the client up quickly and show that you understand what they are planning, so they feel their event is in the right place.
• Visible speed. When someone follows up fast, the client reads it as genuine interest in making them happy. In his words, that creates trust.

On the hotel side, the challenge is making this work at a sensible cost. He points to a familiar pain: the number of disconnected systems staff have to click through.

Fix your SOPs before you add technology

To grow event revenue without hiring, Fritzges starts with something every hotel can do itself. Whatever technology you roll out later, your setup has to be clear to every person on the team. That means standard operating procedures.

• Check whether everyone in the team has the same expectations and the same guideline for handling requests. He promises that in most cases they do not.
• Bring that to one common standard and write it down as SOPs.
• Use those SOPs to review your property management system and your sales and catering system. Are templates and default values set up and maintained correctly? In his experience they usually are not.

The obstacle is time. His advice is to make the time anyway.

“Zeit muss man sich einfach nehmen, erst mal die Basis zu schaffen, in eine Situation zu kommen, wo ich überhaupt auch in die Lage bin, also Geschwindigkeit und mehr Fokus auf den Kunden zu setzen.”

Bernd Fritzges, 19:18

(Translated: “You simply have to make the time to build the basis first, to get into a position where you are able at all to put speed and more focus on the client.”)

A clean base is what makes a quick and accurate reply to every hotel RFP possible, with or without new tools.

Hospitality quality is why clients choose a conference hotel

A conference hotel should keep asking why the client comes to it. Having run thousands of events, Fritzges says he does not pick a hotel for the coolest livestream studio. He picks it for overnight stays, meeting space and food and beverage, and above all for its hospitality quality. Knowing which client segments you serve best is the core of hotel market segmentation.

So the personal touchpoints, where people are at the centre, deserve the spotlight. To protect them, administrative work has to become more productive. His company had hotel processes researched scientifically, and one finding concerns profile matching: searching for a guest or company profile in the PMS can take up to six minutes at its peak.

“Die 6 Minuten würde ich lieber in die Kommunikation mit meinem Kunden investieren, als in System nach irgendwelchen Profilen, Namen und Firmendaten zu suchen.”

Bernd Fritzges, 23:13

(Translated: “I would rather invest those 6 minutes in talking to my client than in searching a system for some profiles, names and company details.”)

Where AI fits in event sales

Formats have moved from one-way presentations towards co-creative elements, but on the hotel side little changed for twenty years, he says. The real shift is coming now through AI, because events are more complex than selling a room, with room combinations and the displacement of individual bookings. That complexity is what AI is suited for.

He expects lean, largely automated formats on one side and premium formats centred on people on the other. His advice for anyone changing processes:

• Do not chase a hype. Agree in the team what the goal is, what you expect and what value it adds.
• Involve operations, the people who will work with the system, and let them evaluate it.
• Keep a human in the loop, because that is what clients expect from a hotel.

You can watch the full conversation (in German) for his complete view on handling MICE requests.

Frequently asked questions

How fast should you respond to a hotel RFP?

In the experience of Bernd Fritzges, the expectation in the MICE market is a qualified offer within 24 hours. His figures for Germany show that only 8 percent of hotels manage that, and that 36 percent of incoming requests are never answered at all. Speed alone is not enough, though: the offer also has to match what the client needs.

What should a hotel RFP response include?

It should show the client that the event is in good hands. That starts with a real needs analysis, so the offer fits the format, the industry and the setup the client has in mind. Then comes speed, which signals genuine interest and builds trust. Fritzges sees the combination of quality and speed as what drives conversion.

Why do hotels miss so many event requests?

Fritzges names two causes. First, a shortage of skilled staff, because event requests need real know-how, for example about the pharma code of conduct when a pharmaceutical company asks. Second, cost pressure, which hotels try to absorb with technology on top of many disconnected systems. At one hotel he found more than 1,000 unread request emails.

Can technology replace event sales staff?

Not in his view. He expects AI to take over much of the complex and administrative work, such as combining rooms or searching profiles. But he insists on a human in the loop, because clients choose a conference hotel for its hospitality quality. Time saved in systems should go into personal contact with the client.