What to do When Groups Hog Your Room Block

What do you do when groups hog the room block? (Photo Credit Adobe Stock/motortion)

PCMA’s Catalyst community offers members a platform to ask each other questions, share ideas, or, as the website says, “communicate and collaborate.” Each month Convene features some of the most popular topics in the forum. Here’s a sampling from a recent Catalyst discussion.

Hogging the Room Block

“My organization has had an issue with exhibitors reserving lots of hotel rooms within our block, sometimes to the point where the block is totally sold and we have to send new registrants and exhibitors to other hotels, only to drop many of the rooms right before the conference,” Melanie Hughes Younger, CMP, director, conferences and events for BICSI, wrote to the PCMA Catalyst community in 2016 in a post that was recently answered again with new information. “Although we have escaped attrition liability thus far, that is certainly a concern for the future. Additionally, it impacts our history and causes ill-will with attendees who wish to stay at the headquarters hotel and cannot. Has anyone encountered this issue and found ways to mitigate it? If so, I would love to hear solutions!”

This year we will require exhibitors who need more than 10 rooms for their group to fill in a request form. Then we will look at past history to see if their request is reasonable, and based on that, approve it or ask them to revise the number of rooms requested. We will hold them responsible for 90 percent of their reserved number of rooms, after the cut-off date.

—Penelope Freire, Meetings and Exhibits Manager, American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics