NASHVILLE, Tenn. — As group travel slowly returns in the U.S., hoteliers say sales strategy and how meetings will take place have changed.

Kristi White, chief product officer at software company Knowland, which provides group data analysis for hotels, said during the session "Group Preferences Post-Pandemic — and How To Adapt With Them" at the 2021 Hotel Data Conference that she's bullish on the return of group business to hotels.

"Our [chief financial officer] has this brilliant phrase that said, 'We're going to have an absolutely fundamentally phenomenal 12 to 24 months — we just don't know when that 12 to 24 months is going to be," she said.

But as it does return, Tim Rector, vice president of global sales, North America, at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, said meeting planners are rusty and nervous after the past year.

"They need our help to work with them and customize meetings," he said.

And in some cases, sales teams haven't fully returned to work. Dawn Gallagher, chief sales and marketing officer at Fairfax, Virginia-based management company Crescent Hotels & Resorts, said she instead calls it "people planning meetings today, not meeting planners."

White said she often hears from meeting planners that they can't get in touch with sales teams at hotels where they used to. Some sales members are covering other duties still amid the labor shortage.

"Now, if they're making the phone calls, they can't get [request for proposals] returned either," she said.

Gallagher added the sales cycle for group meetings takes a long time, and now risk management is involved.

"Now they're telling our travelers when to travel, who can travel and that becomes different," she said, adding risk management teams are dictating where meetings can be held.

"That's brand-new. I hope that doesn't continue," Gallagher said.

When asked if meeting planners are pushing back on future pricing, hoping for discounts and expecting all services like food and beverage and housekeeping to be available, Gallagher said it depends on when the meeting will be held. A year from now is a completely different discussion than if the meeting was in 60 days, she said.

"I will tell you that when I talk to meeting planners, the first thing that they ask me is, 'Dawn, does that hotel have food and beverage? Because if they don't, I'm not coming,'" she said.

In the past, meeting planners never had to worry about whether those amenities would be restricted. Explaining this to planners now has been frustrating, she said.

Gallagher said she is an advocate of getting those outlets open; otherwise, business will be lost. But oftentimes, catering business is booked before it's decided who and how many employees will staff it.

"You'd never think about it [pre-pandemic], we had staff in a hotel seven days a week. Our job was just to book it," she said. "Now, you have to stop ... and say whose really going to staff that?

"These parts of the discussion haven't been talked about enough," she added.

Rector said pre-pandemic, Wyndham would take just about any group business. Now, Wyndham's hotels need to do an extensive walk-through, including conversations with sales and management, of what it will entail before the event is booked.

"We may have to turn it down, where before we'd simply take anything," he said.

Rector added that he had one client ask what the specific staffing ratio would look like for an event. Customers are concerned about it.

Gallagher said there isn't as much of a conversation around rate, however. It's more so laying out what each hotel is providing.

White said her company is in the midst of conducting a survey, and through some of the calls she's had so far for preliminary research, hotels are telling groups who are starting to plan for next year that they should expect a 20%-30% increase in costs across the board.

Additionally, White said some hotels are telling customers they may need to pay for meeting room rental.

"It's my fond hope that [as] we come out of this, hotels no longer say, 'Oh, you have 100 rooms, we'll comp that meeting space," she said.

Some hotels are prepping their sales teams to tell customers, "It's $10,000 for the meeting space, you've got 100 rooms, I'll knock it down to $5,000," she said.

For larger hybrid events in which some meeting attendees would tune in virtually, Rector said Wyndham has partnered with vendors that allow them to pull that off pretty well.

But to have a hybrid meeting is difficult for smaller organizations or those that don't have the funds and staffing to do hold it, he said.

"It's not cheap to do virtual attendance," he said.

White said the days of free Wi-Fi are gone for customers looking to hold a hybrid meeting.

"You're going to need so much more bandwidth to do [hybrid meetings] than you've ever needed before," she said.

Gallagher said an additional con to hybrid meetings is the audio quality for virtual attendees is not reliable.

"From a small meetings perspective, it doesn't work," she said, adding the meetings don't always come across as compelling for online viewers.

Rector said the evolution has shown that revenue management and sales are one unit now. And operations is right next to them as well, because this affects operations teams.

"We're in this hand in hand because everything has to be so special and customized," he said.

Gallagher said if revenue teams aren't aligned with operations, "they lose." And operations can put a ceiling on sales and revenue performance.

In most locations, hotels only have a finite number of rooms they can sell each night. If there aren't good customer review scores and service scores, that negatively affects their potential to capture group bookings, she added.

"We're going to make sure that experience, full circle, has happened not only for the meeting planner but for the attendee and every traveler that goes into the hotel," she said. "We can't be successful unless we have created this chain-link fence around each other."