What are the costs involved?
shortleadmeetings.com currently offers three package options. The first is an annual
registration fee of £485 plus VAT per venue with no commission, the second
is an annual registration fee of £285 plus VAT and we will invoice for 8%
commission in each piece of confirmed business, the third is a commission only package,
there's no registration fee and commission will be charged at 15% on each confirmed
booking.
You can change your option online if you find that one option suits you better than
the one you originally selected too.
Not only do you get to list your venue, but we welcome news articles for our home
page and we can provide you with the coding to sit behind a button or a graphic
on your own site so your meeting space can be booked online from your own site -
contact us for more details on this.
The vast majority of bookings made via shortleadmeetings are from the direct sector,
however, some venue agents do use shortleadmeetings and their commission terms should
also be honoured when booking via shortleadmeetings.com too.
Who are your targeted booker audience?
We have an initial database of in excess of 4500 corporate, association and charity
bookers. At the top end of this database we have 800 bookers, each unique to a corporate,
association or charity (therefore high scope for colleague referral) who are responsible
for booking in excess of 7500 meetings and conferences per year.
How will you attract bookers to use shortleadmeetings.com?
shortleadmeetings.com intends on becoming the conference and meetings industry equivalent
to lastminute.com – a site that is a bookers first port of call when arranging a
short lead meeting. We have a strong marketing plan in place which includes, but
is not limited to exciting, “must have” monthly incentives, targeted e-newsletters,
advertising, updates and, for both bookers and venues alike, regular site updates
to include use of the latest leading edge technology at all times. If you would
like to promote your venue further by becoming involved in future booker monthly
incentives and/or featuring in a news article (news will be featured on the home
page, ie, the first page a booker will see) please do contact us at advertising@shortleadmeetings.com.
How do I register?
There are two options available. You can either register online which is essentially
a two stage process. Stage (1) is that you register and create an account and Stage
(2) is when you enter your venue(s) information, ie, contact details, description
and photo of your venue and your meeting room matrix. Once these two stages have
been completed you are free to enter your meeting room availability and rates which
immediately become available to bookers. If you prefer not to register online then
we can provide you with a registration form by email for you to complete and email
back to us.
How we will receive enquiries?
Bookers are able to search by filling in as much or as little of the search criteria
as they wish. With one click they will see all the venues with meeting rooms availability
that meets their search criteria. Bookers then decide on their venue, click on the
“Book” button and that creates a “provisional booking” email that will be sent directly
to you. When you register your venue you will also be able to include a second email
address and all enquiries will be copied to this address so Conference and Banqueting
can work on the enquiries and Sales can monitor the enquiry levels.
How often should we change our room availability?
Adding and amending room availability is a straightforward, quick process – we’ve
made it that way on purpose. You can add and/or change availability as often as
you like, ideally if a room becomes unavailable then we would ask that this is removed
as soon as possible to avoid bookers disappointment, but as we understand that shortleadmeetings.com
will not be the only way that enquiries will come to through to you, we have put
a caveat in the terms and conditions that covers non-availability of a requested
meeting room. Bookers will not be able to search for “passed dates”. If a booker
does not enter any dates in the search criteria shortleadmeetings.com will only
show forward availability based on that day’s date. Any unsold space will “drop”
off the system.
Should we include all our meeting room availability?
That’s entirely up to you. Some venues that we’ve spoken to intend only to include
their smaller boardroom/training rooms on shortleadmeetings.com, others intend to
include all meeting rooms and all availability over the coming three months.
What sort of future developments should we expect to see?
Many! We have plans to add a truly interactive map for bookers, to the point that
they will be able to define a search area themselves. shortleadmeetings.com will
also, uniquely, allow venues to promote “special offers”. You will shortly be able
to add details of promotions and these will link to your availability, if the promotion
is available on the search dates selected by the booker. For example, during the
summer from 1st July to 31st August, booking a meeting with you would benefit from
a private BBQ lunch or complimentary ice creams during the afternoon tea/coffee
break then this is a way to further promote your offers and this will be coming
soon. We will soon be able to offer you the ability to upload virtual tours of your
properties. shortleadmeetings.com has a powerful reporting tool that means we are
able to report back to you in terms of your market share of enquiries, etc., but
our aim is to have this available for you to be able to access direct. We are also
working on a “request a call” facility too. This may be an offering further down
the road, but we’d like to offer bookers the chance to “request a call” direct from
the venue that they’ve selected. Exciting plans are afoot, but if you have any developments
that you’d like to see please do let us know at info@shortleadmeetings.com.
If we’ve not managed to answer your question above, or you would like further clarification
of any of the answers above please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@shortleadmeetings.com.