This was posted as a Soccer America blog entry and appears at http://blogs.socceramerica.com/youth_soccer_insider/?p=53
By Tom Berkman
Tournaments and hotels — the proverbial love-hate relationship. Directors of tournaments with many out-of-town teams know they cannot live without the hotels, but many wonder at times exactly whose side the hotels are on. If your tournament is not using a sports housing service to handle the hotel responsibilities, and you are a Tournament Director that has a great relationship with every hotel you use in your city, consider yourself lucky.
However, the norm is that working with hotels can have a litany of issues and challenges that start with the contracting and end with the payment of your rebate. Here are some how-to approaches to make your interaction with the hotel community more successful:
The Hometown Event. Some tournaments move from city to city every year, while others hosted by a local club or organization are in the same location every year. The events that move every year enjoy special treatment from host cities that must often offer perks to win the bid.
The Hometown event or tournament can after a few short years be taken for granted by the hotel community, because the hotels already get the business. Don’t take it personally — the local event is often treated with less respect than it deserves.
If your tournament is in the same city every year, there are ways to regain the leverage.
A more common practice these days is requiring teams to use the hotels you have contracted with as a condition to play in your tournament. The bottom line is that, as expenses increase each year to run a tournament, generating strong rebate revenue from the hotels allows you to keep the application fee down and keep your tournament more competitive with other tournaments.
If you will require this of the teams, it changes the relationship with the hotels, as they must work with you (on your terms) to get the business.
A different form of leverage is available to you if you have the ability to move your tournament to another city (far enough away that different hotels are used), where you award your tournament to the highest bidding city.
Cities get substantial hotel tax from the hotel revenues, so even a tournament filling 500 rooms for two nights could be enough for a city to give you some cash, reduced venue fees, and/or in-kind services to get your tournament to their town.
If you are in the position to move, consider bidding it out for 2-year increments, so instead of being the hometown event, multiple cities in your state are bidding for your business. If you do this, make sure the wish list you give to each Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) covers the additional expenses to make the move and motivates you financially to make the move at all.
What To Ask For. When dealing with the hotels, no matter what city you are in, here is what you should expect from them:
* Free meeting space in exchange for naming the hotel Headquarters Hotel.
* Free or substantially reduced rates for staff/officials for naming the hotel Officials’ Hotel.
* A tournament rate that the hotel will not sell below.
* The promise that the hotel will not accept team bookings outside of your block.
* A reasonable comp ratio — at least of 1/20 paid for limited service hotels and 1/40 paid for full service hotels.
* A rebate built into the rate, non-negotiable, and the same for every hotel.
* The rebate paid no later than 30 days after the tournament
* The assurance that, if the reported numbers at a hotel seem low, you will get credit for the appropriate room-nights if you can prove a team stayed at a hotel.
Terms and Conditions in the Contracts. If your tournament has enough overnight travelers that you sign contracts with the hotels in order to ensure the rooms are set aside for your teams, then here are the contractual terms you should not agree to:
* Attrition — in any form. Not as a penalty (i.e. if you don’t use a minimum percentage of the rooms blocked — often 80 percentage), not as a right of the hotel to raise the rate, and not as a right of the hotel to reduce or eliminate your concessions
* Cancellation — cross out anything more than 30 days before arrival.
* Damage — insist that any damage done to the hotel be borne by each individual guest, not the tournament.
* Indemnification — cross it out, or change it to Mutual.
* Security — cross out any line that suggests that the hotel can require you to hire and pay for security at its discretion.
* Arbitration and/or waiving your right to a trial. Cross it out, or you could watch your rebate be arbitrated away.
What You Should Do for the Hotels. Now that you know how to protect your tournament, remember that working with hotels successfully needs to be win-win for both parties. That starts with communicating the details of your tournament to your hotels. Before you sign the first contract, here are some things they would like know:
* Do teams have to qualify to get into the tournament? Are any teams rejected or does every team that applies get accepted?
* Until what date are teams accepted? (That way, they know how late they may get reservations).
* Is it an elimination tournament (one bad day and they’re gone), or is every team there for the duration?
* Where are the venues? If there are multiple venues, does the tournament specify in advance what age brackets are playing where, thus helping the teams book in the right hotels?
This information may shape the number of rooms the hotels give you and on what nights, won’t be a cause for surprise or disappointment later on.
In terms of advertising the hotels to the teams, provide good information about each hotel, more than just a phone number and contact name.
As teams apply and you see the number of out-of-town teams has increased or declined from previous years, update the hotels with that information.
To help the hotels manage the flow of people coming and going from their hotel, if possible, give the hotels the times the teams will be playing.
Lastly, one of the most important things you can do for a hotel is to recommend and support the use of a code of conduct policy that every room signs at check-in.
If you follow that up with the promise that any team asked to leave a hotel for improper behavior will also be disqualified from playing in the tournament, you will have created an atmosphere that will keep your relationship with the hotels healthy, and coming back for more.
(Tom Berkman is General Manager and Owner of the THS Company , a sports housing service that works with over 140 client tournaments and events nationwide. Tom is a ’76 graduate of the Hilton School of Hotel & Restaurant Mgt. at the University of Houston, and spent 22 years in hotel and restaurant operations before starting THS in 1998. You can contact him at Tom@thsweb.com )
