Group Hotel Bookings - How to Get Good Rates

As the person who organizes trips for your group, you will need to know how to get good hotel rates when you and your group travel. There are a number of things you can do to get better deals for your group. To do this it helps to know a little of how hotels operate and handle their bookings.

As a group staying in a hotel, you may expect to get better rates than an individual or family. Hotels generally consider a booking of 10 or more rooms a group booking. Below this point you are unlikely to get any real discount on your booking. This normally equates to a minimum group size of 20 people taking double (1 double bed) or twin (2 single beds) rooms. You can cram your group into quad and triple rooms but these are generally intended for families and you will often find that the 3rd and 4th beds are sofa or pull out beds.

Supply and demand

The rate you get out of a hotel is fundamentally governed by supply and demand. If you are organising a trip to Edinburgh when the festival is on you will find it difficult to get good rates by your self. All the hotels in Edinburgh at this time could easily fill their hotels twice over. As a result they can get away with charging almost what ever they want even for low quality accommodation. If timing is not important, try and book on of peak dates. You will be able to get much better quotes. Make sure you don't try and book when events are going on in that location unless you are attending them of course. Hotels may have certain weekends or weeks that just have not filled for what ever reason. Try asking if there is an alternative date they could give you a better rate on. They may be able to pick quiet weekends when they would not mind reducing the rate to fill up the hotel.

Bargaining power

If you give a hotel plenty of business you will have better bargaining power over rates. If you give a hotel hassle free business you may be able to get better rates. If you have an annual trip with your group you could try to use the same hotel each year so they no you will give them repeat business. This may help them to give you better rates than they otherwise would to keep your business. Organizing multiple trips for multiple groups will also help you to negotiate better rates with a hotel. This is one reason why you can sometimes get better rates going through a professional group organizer. They give hotels enough business that they can get rates that even after marking-up, work out cheaper than what you could get by your self direct.

Negotiation

Don't be afraid to negotiate with a hotel. Hotels will not normally give you the best rate they can do straight away. They will give you the rate they want to sell at although they can drop back to a certain point. Keep negotiating until you think you have reached that point. You can also try playing one hotel of another. Get quotes from another hotel. Even if it is not cheaper tell the hotel you are negotiating with that a competitor has offered you £5 per night less and can they match it? You will however need to bear in mind the likely demand for hotel accommodation at the time you want to book. If a hotel can easily be filled at that time they will be more resistive to negotiation.

Web sites

Most web sites are intended for booking accommodation for families, single travelers and small groups of friends. Most are not really intended for group accommodation booking. You need to be careful about how many rooms are actually available and whether this meats your needs.

Often tour operators commit to filling a certain number of hotel rooms in a hotel and are financially liable to pay for those rooms whether they fill them or not. They will have a target to break even and a target to make reasonable profit. Once these have been met they will be left with a number of rooms they just want to get rid of and sell as they have already met their required profit margin. You will often find these rooms on websites like lastminute.com and Expedia. On these sites they can often reduce the price of the room to below cost as the profit for their allocation has already been met and they just need to get rid of the rooms.

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Group Hotel Bookings - How to Get Good Rates