Quality vs. Price: Going Through Procurement

“A meeting is a living, breathing thing with a million moving parts,” says Michael Meyer, marketing manager at Morrissey Hospitality, a hospitality management firm in St. Paul. “If one thing happens, it can set off a chain of events. It’s the relationship between the meeting planner and the facility they’re working with that helps minimize the impact. And if the meeting planner doesn’t really know the people, it can fall apart.”

Ted Trembath, director of catering at Hilton Minneapolis, concurs. “You can’t reduce what we do down to square footage and rates,” he says. “There are so many other intangibles. We had one group who gave us annual business for years, and then they had to go back and bid out the job. We were just crossing our fingers that they took into consideration all the extra things we’d always done—providing extra security or having a manager there when they check in late at night. A lot of those things weren’t even necessarily on the contract.”

The Hilton did end up keeping the contract, Trembath says. But he sometimes finds working through procurement departments unnerving. “You worry that they will just go with the lowest bid,” he says. “And you kind of get what you pay for.”

Suburban hotels, for instance, may be attractively priced venues, but the choice of an urban versus a suburban location should be made with the attendees in mind. Out-of-town visitors may feel trapped, or be inconvenienced, by an isolated hotel with limited access to the convention center and downtown. Or the opposite may be the case.

Wendy Fox, area meeting planner in the Minneapolis office of Ernst & Young, LLP, an international management consulting company, works in tandem with a procurement department in another location that may not understand the needs of her local audience. “We might do an event for an audience that’s primarily outside the downtown area,” she says. “They might recommend a hotel that’s in the heart of downtown, but that might cause issues with traffic and parking and access. So instead, we might recommend a country club location with a parking lot in the southern suburbs, where more of the attendees are located.”