 Meeting planners, do you ever wonder why hotels do things a certain way, like charge you an arm and a leg for Wi-Fi in the meeting rooms? Well, folks, today's video and blog post tackles these very conundrums that you might be thinking about when working with your hotels. Stick around. Hey friends, it's Leanne and if you work with hotels on your meetings and conferences, chances are you've scratched your head over the years and thought, well, why can't I do that? So today we're going to talk about some of the more popular why can't I do that scenarios with hotels and hopefully give you some answers on why hotels do things. Scenario number one, why can't I bring my own food into the hotel? Folks, this isn't only about cost recovery and revenue for the hotel, but rather it deals with worker safety health standards and liability issues when it comes to food preparation at the hotel. So it's actually in your best interest to use the catering that is provided by the hotel so that everyone is covered to the highest of standards that the hotel has set out. So that's unfortunately why you can't bring your own food into a hotel. Scenario number two, why can't I use a meeting room as a hospitality suite? Well folks, similar to scenario number one, this deals with liability issues and liquor licensing. And when you have a hospitality in a meeting room, chances are you're bringing in your own liquor and the hotel likely doesn't have the ability, the legal ability to allow you to do that. So once again, when you're in a meeting room, not only do you have to procure the food that's prepared on property, but also any liquor that the hotel is covered for through their liquor license. Scenario number three, why can't I negotiate that high cost of parking? Folks, the parking one kills me too. It is so expensive for our delegates to park, but often the parking is not even with the hotel management, but with a completely separate company. So chances are if you're really struggling to negotiate parking, it's because it's really out of their control and they're not getting revenue from the parking either. Scenario number four, why is meeting room internet so expensive? To make a very long and boring AV story short, wiring a facility for 500 or 5000 connections is a lot different than wiring our home for our 10 or 15 connections. Internet in a convention center in a hotel can be super expensive, especially if it's high speed for all of those people. So we're paying for that internet because it costs them a pretty dime to get that system set up in place so that you could have seamless internet. I did do a blog post on how to assess your Wi-Fi needs and you can find that post in the description for this video and in the comment section below as well. Scenario number five, why do they charge if I want to bring in my own AV company? As you know, hotels have preferred partnerships in place with AV firms to keep consistency across the board and of course to have someone familiar with their property when meeting planners do come in and want to plan their program seamlessly. But with those preferred suppliers, they're also responsible for things that you're going to use regardless of who you hire, like electricity, the rigging in the ceiling, and those are sometimes exclusive to the AV firm because of safety issues and because of their nature with working with the hotel. Bringing in an outside AV firm is always a negotiable point though. So if you have a third party AV company that you like using, please talk to the hotel or to your site selection professional about things you can do to ensure that those patch fees and AV third party fees are kept at a minimum so that you can continue working with the people that you're comfortable with. Scenario number six, why do I need to guarantee so many guest rooms? I think this is the biggest one where we have to realize that hotels are a for profit business, so they're charging you either for guest rooms or for meeting space rental, and of course for food and beverage which actually has quite a low profit ratio. So guest rooms is how hotels make a majority of their revenue, and if you don't guarantee those guest rooms, this is not a great piece of business for the hotel, and they will find a piece of business that's a better fit for them. Plus every hotel has a different rooms to space ratio, how many guest rooms do they have, compared to how much meeting space they have to offer. So you may not have to guarantee as many guest rooms at a hotel that doesn't have a ton of meeting space, as opposed to a hotel that is a convention hotel, and they're looking to sell buckets of meeting space along with buckets of guest rooms. So every hotel has a different rooms to space ratio, but guaranteeing your rooms is what's keeping some of your other costs lower, like your meeting room rentals and of course your food and beverage minimums. Scenario number seven, why can't the hotel donate the leftover food from my event to the food? For the citizens, it's not that they don't want to, but going back to scenario number one, there are health and safety regulations that they need to abide by, and there's only certain foods that they can donate to food bank, even if they're set up to do that. There's municipal guidelines that they need to follow, the food bank has guidelines as well as what food they can accept, and the way the hotel prepares the food drives a lot of what can and cannot be donated. The best way to talk about how a hotel can donate food to the food bank is to have a conversation with the hotel, your CSM themselves, because every single hotel will operate differently. And if this is very important to you, then have that conversation and have it early enough in the planning process so that when you choose your menu selections, you're choosing things that might even actually be a better fit for the food bank after the conference is over. Planners, keep in mind everything I've mentioned in this video, some of these things are still negotiable. All I wanted to highlight are some of the reasons that the hotels may have for not being able to provide you with some of those things. But it doesn't mean that a dialogue can't take place to ensure that you're getting things that respond to the needs of your program and to your delegates. For more tips on meeting planning, hop on over to conferencesource.net, check out all of our meeting planning blogs in our meeting planning category. And if there's another why can't I do that scenario that you'd like us to speak on, will you let me know? We'll even feature it in a future blog post. Thanks for watching this week's video. I wish you all the best this upcoming planning season. Have a great week. Bye for now.