After years of talk about measuring
return on investment and determining the value of meetings, web
tools have emerged to help planners actually figure it out.
The ROI Toolkit (roitoolkit.exhibitsurveys.net), which debuted earlier
this year, is a joint effort of Red Bank, N.J.-based Exhibit
Surveys and multiple industry associations. The free site helps
planners determine whether to participate in a show and at what
level of investment, based on key attributes (number of qualified
attendees or how many attendees the booth staff will encounter per
hour, for example). It’ll even show how to optimize ROI, whether by
changing the size of the booth or the number of staff needed to
populate it.
MeetingTrader.com, which launches later this
month, is a subscription-based site that lets planners speak the
language of hotel revenue managers, calculating exactly what a
meeting is worth to the hotel and breaking out handy metrics like
total revenue per occupied room (RevPOR) and revenue per occupied
space time (RevPOST), which, if leveraged correctly, could aid
contract negotiations tremendously. On the site, planners create
templates with custom data fields that reflect every budget item
for the meeting. They can compare costs at up to five hotels at
once, including attrition at various cut-off dates set in the
contract. (For hotel salespeople, there’s a separate section of
Meeting Trader that computes profit margins.)
These sites represent a tactical step
forward: Already aware of the utility of the calculations, planners
now can do the math.