RFP Best Practices

Hotel RFP Management Platform Delivers High-Converting Leads to Hotels

In today’s competitive hospitality landscape, managing RFPs efficiently can make the difference between thriving and merely surviving. Yet according to our recent webinar poll, 65% of hotels have no reliable way to track who they lost their business to, while sales teams waste countless hours responding to unqualified leads that never convert.

Enter Hopskip—a specialized hotel RFP management platform designed specifically to solve these pain points. Unlike all-in-one event management systems that try to do everything, we focus on doing one thing exceptionally well: streamlining the hotel sourcing process for both properties and planners.

“At Hopskip, we lead the industry with an 80% conversion rate overall of RFPs sourced to booked within the platform,” explains Luke Whalin, Co-founder. This success stems from a difference in our approach: every planner sending RFPs through Hopskip is a paying subscriber, creating a natural quality filter that ensures only serious inquiries reach your sales team.

For hotels looking to optimize their group sales process, increase conversion opportunities, and gain valuable competitive insights, understanding how a dedicated hotel RFP management platform differs from traditional solutions is the first step toward winning more business.

Solving the Top RFP Management Challenges for Hotels

Hotel sales teams face several critical challenges with traditional RFP processes. Let’s explore how a specialized hotel RFP management platform addresses these pain points:

Wasted Time on Unqualified Leads

Unlike platforms that offer free access to planners, Hopskip implements a subscription paywall for all meeting planners. “Every planner sends your hotels an RFP; they are paying an annual subscription,” explains Whalin. That paywall acts as a quality filter.” This ensures that every RFP you receive comes from a planner with serious intent and budget commitment.

No Competitive Intelligence

Hopskip’s Premium features provide immediate visibility into your competitive landscape. For each RFP, you can see which competing hotels received the request, who submitted proposals, and even the average room and F&B rates being offered across all RFPs. This intelligence allows you to position your property strategically rather than guessing at competitive rates.

Mystery of Lost Business

Our poll showed that 65% of hotels can’t track who won business they lost. Hopskip eliminates this blind spot by automatically sharing which property won the business, along with average room rates and F&B estimates from the winning proposal. This valuable insight helps inform future pricing strategies and competitive positioning.

What Makes Hopskip’s RFP Management Platform Different

Hopskip stands apart from traditional RFP platforms in several fundamental ways that deliver clear advantages to hotel partners:

Specialized Focus on Hotel Sourcing

Unlike comprehensive event management systems that tackle everything from registration to attendee management, Hopskip is laser-focused on one thing: being the best at sourcing hotels. This specialization allows for deeper features specifically designed for the unique needs of hotel sales teams and meeting planners engaged in the RFP process.

Exclusive, High-Quality Leads

“We are never free to planners,” emphasizes Whalin. When you get a lead from Hopskip, you know that the planner and their RFP are high-quality and high-converting.”

Even more importantly, these leads are exclusive to Hopskip and do not overlap with other platforms like Cvent, providing a completely new channel for business opportunities.

Professional, Business-Focused Planners

The platform works exclusively with professional meeting planners focused on business events. Major clients include the American Association for Cancer Research, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committees, Progressive Insurance, Forbes, and VistaPrint.

Key Features That Save Hotels Time and Win More Business

Hopskip’s hotel RFP management platform includes several powerful features designed to streamline operations and increase conversion opportunities:

Comprehensive Hotel Profiles

Create detailed property profiles that pre-populate proposal information. “By building out your space, including the rooms here, not only does the planner see this as a capacity chart on your profile, but when you assign your space, you can do it from a drop-down menu,” explains Whalin. “It’s incredibly quick.”

Unlimited Team Access

Hopskip provides unlimited logins for your entire team at no additional cost. “We do not charge for logins. There’s no reason every single seller shouldn’t have their own login,” notes Whalin.

Real-Time Engagement Notifications

On premium versions, sellers receive immediate notifications when planners actively review their proposals. “The seller assigned to the lead will be notified via email in real-time when the planner reviews their bid,” Whalin explains. When you get that notification, I always recommend that you come into the messenger and shoot them a message because you know they’re actively in Hopskip and reviewing.

Win/Loss Reporting

Gain valuable insights into every piece of business, including who won when you didn’t and the average rates from the winning proposal. This information helps inform future strategies and provides valuable reporting metrics for ownership and management.

The Game-Changing Market Availability Feature

One of Hopskip’s newest features, Market Availability, fundamentally transforms how hotels can engage with RFPs in their market, even when not initially included:

Respectful of Sales Team Bandwidth

Unlike traditional lead generation approaches that require full proposal development for uncertain opportunities, Market Availability allows a quick response. “Something a hotel seller can do in 10 minutes or less. So the hotel seller’s bandwidth is being respected,” Whalin notes.

Strategic Timing for Maximum Impact

The feature integrates seamlessly into planners’ workflow, appearing when they most likely need additional options. “Inevitably, when that planner gets turndowns, they get high rates, or most commonly, stakeholders say to widen the scope. Now they can go down here and say, ‘Oh, the Acme Hotel, never even thought about them. What a great rate, availability, request for proposal.'”

Proven Results

According to Whalin, hotels using this feature have seen “lead generation increases by 87%,” making it a powerful tool for properties in competitive or oversaturated markets.

Getting Started with Hopskip’s Hotel RFP Management Platform

Taking advantage of Hopskip’s hotel RFP management capabilities is straightforward:

Step 1: Complete Your Hotel Profile

The most important first step is building out your comprehensive hotel profile. “Please, everybody, fill out that profile,” emphasizes Whalin. “It’s going to save you so much time responding, make it way easier, and make your profile look how you want it to as well.”

Step 2: Ensure Lead Assignment Processes

Establish clear protocols for lead catchers to assign RFPs to appropriate sales team members.

Step 3: Respond Through the Platform

All proposals must be submitted through Hopskip to maintain the integrity of the process and ensure planners can use the platform’s comparison tools. “If you send the planner a PDF or anything like that, you are highly diminishing your chances of winning the booking and being considered,” warns Whalin.

Step 4: Utilize Available Support

Hopskip provides comprehensive support through its chat feature. “Our live support team is based in North America. They’re open from 8 to 9 Eastern and typically respond in less than a minute,” explains Whalin. This ensures quick resolution to any questions or challenges.

Get Ready to Transform Your RFP Management Approach

In today’s competitive hospitality landscape, hotels need every advantage to maximize group business opportunities. A specialized hotel RFP management platform like Hopskip delivers:

• Higher-quality, exclusive RFP opportunities from paying planners
• Significant time savings through completing your profile information
• Competitive intelligence to inform strategic pricing decisions
• Clear visibility into booking outcomes, even when you don’t win
• Expanded reach to planners who might otherwise overlook your property

As our poll results showed, 61% of hotels want better budget information from planners, while 65% have no reliable way to track lost business. Hopskip’s focused solution addresses these exact pain points, providing the tools and insights needed to improve your RFP response strategy.

By adopting a specialized hotel RFP management platform designed specifically for the unique challenges of group business development, your property can improve conversion rates, reduce wasted effort on unqualified leads, and gain valuable competitive intelligence that drives strategic decision-making.

Ready to experience the difference a purpose-built hotel RFP management platform can make for your property? Schedule a demo to learn more.

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