If you are booking hotel rooms for a group- read the contract very carefully. I copied and pasted this article August 2013 Unsold Rooms Credit: Is a Hotel Obligated? by Tyler Davidson A recent blog post on MeetingsFocus by meetings industry attorney and speaker Joshua L. Grimes, managing attorney of Grimes Law Offices, reinforced probably the most practical pieces of legal advice going: Make sure to read the contract and don’t be afraid to add clauses. This bit of obvious—yet often not heeded—advice is especially true in the area of unsold rooms for meetings, and meeting planners who don’t take an aggressive approach in understanding the contract clauses relating to this potential financial time bomb can put their career and organization in peril. “Many planners do not realize that there’s no obligation for the hotel to give credit for resold rooms unless you put something in the contract, because it’s sort of a ‘second nature’ clause,” Grimes says. “I don’t know any hotel who refuses to put that in the contract if they’re asked, but you have to ask.” Grimes says planners should make sure that any damages clause includes a duty for the hotel to try to resell the rooms that their group isn’t using, and to give the group credit for the rooms that are resold, otherwise they have no obligation and can actually end up collecting damages from the organization holding the meeting even if they manage to sell the rooms to non-meeting participants. “On the resale clause, most hotels will agree to it, period,” Grimes notes, adding that an improving economy and hotel occupancy has resulted in facilities taking a harder line in negotiations. “But with the economy getting better, I’m finding that less hotels are agreeing to things that will cost them money, period. And in Las Vegas in particular I’m finding less hotels agreeing to a resell and credit clause—but Las Vegas is a different animal, in some respects.”
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 20:16:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015