Conference Bench - Benchmarking tool for conference and meeting venues

Sunday, 29 November 2009 00:00

Scouting the industry for new solutions and technology that will help our clients to manage their hotels more efficiently and achieve better results, we came across The Conference Bench. A benchmarking tool to optimize revenue and performance of conference and function space.

The Conference Bench delivers benchmarking information for meeting spaces and conference rooms. With Revenue Management for meetings and events developing fast, the need for useful tools is also increasing rapidly. The Conference Bench is a specialist for conference and banqueting revenue management. The company has developed a comprehensive set of reports that contains information about occupancies, performance and revenues of conference space.

The conference bench works based upon key performance indicators such as:

Occcupancy percentage of meeting rooms
Total meeting space revenue and F&B revenue
Revenue per delegate (RevPD)
Revenue per available Square Meter (RevPAS or RevPAM)
Revenue per occupied space (RevPOS)
Delegate numbers, total number of unique delegates per day

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These and other KPI's are brought to you in a clear comparison, giving you valuable market data and market share information. This tool will do for conference and meeting space what The Bench did related to hotel room revenues and performance indexes. It shall not be a surprise that the Conference Bench came forth out of the Bench.

The conference Bench is an online reporting tool using a simple and easy to use method:

KPI's are presented in a weekly performance report
Competitor information is immediately available in the report
Possibility of user generated reporting based on personal queries

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Currently the Conference Bench is operating in the following destinations: London, Dubai, Oslo, Brussels, Frankfurt and Stockholm. in adddition they are rolling out across major European and Middle East destinations of the course of 2009 and 2010.

Obviously there are plenty of reasons to start using this tool. The most obvious reason is that Revenue Management has proven its value to hoteliers in terms of Room Revenue Management, yet in Conference and Banquet Revenue Management this is a relatively unexplored area.

Other key reasons to consider this tool:

Get day by day information for better insight into trends, easier and more accurate analysis
Work with Key Performance Indicators, and gain control of your business
Get combined competitor information on their meeting space revenues
Become aware of your market share and get insight in true business potential of your conference rooms
Excel and/ or graphical flexible reporting based on your preferences and for the time frames that matter to you, like day of week reporting, yearly overviews, and time-scale reports to highlight market trends
ASP based, all data entries are done online and reports are accessible the moment you have access to the internet
Labor unintensive, data entry only takes a couple of minutes per day
High ROI. The investment (a yearly fee) is low compared to the revenue opportunity created when using the reports correctly