Todd Arthur, managing director APAC, HRS
CORPORATE hotel booking platform HRS is set to offer meeting planners in Asia-Pacific its global events space inventory, a result of its partnership with MICE expert Meetago last year.
HRS has been offering MICE booking capabilities in Europe since 2015, and will officially be launching in Asia-Pacific in 2H2016, when users in the region can begin booking meeting venues in other parts of the world. Meanwhile, corporates worldwide will be able to book MICE facilities in Asia-Pacific come end-2016.
The platform is currently in its beta phase here, and was first announced during Travel X’Change 2016, HRS’ own corporate travel trade event which took place yesterday, March 23.
Commenting on the meetings and groups sector in this region, Todd Arthur, managing director APAC, HRS, said: “In the past it is a really fragmented approach where you (manually) contact maybe six hotels and hope some of them get back to you and then there is this long back and forth process.”
He went on to explain that the Meetago system, which is integrated into HRS’ current portal, eases that painful process by allowing meeting organisers the ability to specify exactly what they need – from room size to number of flip charts – and then allowing four suppliers the chance to bid for the job, ensuring competitive pricing.
“It’s a bidding system and if they can meet the client requirements, they can then put a price in. The meeting planner then gets four quotes that meet their exact needs,” explained Arthur.
He added: “It’s a fair system. I think hotels will really embrace it as they have in Europe and they love it because they get a uniform RFP (request for proposal) coming in. Since we’ve launched this, the quickest turnaround time was 47 minutes. It’s almost like booking a room.”
Suppliers don’t get to see the competing bids on the platform and are not able to change the requirements of the client.
“HRS’ extensive portfolio and global reach means we can guarantee a consistent standard of offers and RFP monitoring at a local market level. In addition to the savings gained by the simplification of the process, meeting organisers will benefit from transparent reporting across all booking activities in real time,” added Udo Lülsdorf, founder and CEO of Meetago.
“The process will be completely seamless with customers having access to all of this via the same portal they use for making hotel bookings, meaning they will not have to switch providers or systems.”
HRS currently has an inventory of 75,000 conference venues and 300,000 hotels worldwide.
