Create bookings from RFP inquiries
When you're ready to bid on the business that was sent to your property via MeetingBroker, you can create a booking from the RFP inquiry. After you detail the booking, you can upload your proposed rates to a proposal. As you update the booking details, those changes are automatically sent back to MeetingBroker as business data.
Depending on your MeetingBroker policy, creating a booking and sending a proposal may satisfy escalation on the inquiry.
To create a booking from an RFP inquiry
- Open the RFP inquiry.
- MeetingBroker provides much more information than you can see on the inquiry page, so make sure you do the following to get a complete picture of the RFP requirements:
- Click View Recap. The RFP Recap window opens where you can view details about the group's guestroom and event requirements. You can also see who was notified about the RFP based on the MeetingBroker assignment rules.
- In the RFP History section, open any attachments that were sent with the RFP. Meeting planners sometimes detail their room and event requirements in external documents and attach them to the RFP.
- In the Open Activity and Activity History sections, review any tasks that were created from MeetingBroker notifications (for example, RFP Updated or RFP Awarded). Your property must be using the RFP activities feature to see these notification tasks.
- Click Create Booking.
If you need more time to evaluate the inquiry before creating a booking, click Confirm Receipt. This changes the RFP Milestone from Published to Viewed, which may satisfy escalation on the inquiry depending on your property's MeetingBroker policy.
The Create Booking from Inquiry page opens.
- Use the following options to manage the inquiry's activities:
- Copy All Activities from the Inquiry to the Booking - Select this check box if you want to copy all activities—both open and closed—from the inquiry to the new booking. The activities will be displayed in the Activity (Open Activities) section (if they are still pending) or the Activity History section (if they have been marked complete) on the booking. Open activities will also be displayed as two separate tasks on your Home page, one for the inquiry and one for the booking. This may be an important consideration if your tasks queue is already lengthy.
- Mark All Existing Inquiry Activities Completed - Select this check box if you want to close all open activities on the inquiry. This will remove those tasks from your Home page and move them to the Activity History section of the inquiry record.
This option doesn't close the inquiry's activities before they are copied to the booking. Activities are copied in their current state (open or closed) and then they are marked complete on the inquiry only.
- Review the account and contact information. Using the information from the MeetingBroker RFP, we automatically search for a matching account, contact, agency, and agent.
- If at least one matching record is found, the drop-down field will begin with "Use Existing". Click the drop-down arrow to see if multiple matches are available. If you want to open the record to make sure it's a match, select it in the drop-down field, and then click the View link beside it.
- If no match is found, the drop-down field will begin with "Create New". If you want to create a new account/contact etc., leave the field showing the Create New text.
- If you want to put the booking in an umbrella account (like Weddings 2025), search for and select an existing account in the Account field. An account is required to convert an inquiry to a booking. Once an account is selected, you will only be able to select contacts that already exist on that account, or create a new contact. You will be able to select a contact from a different account (if needed) on the resulting booking record.
- If needed, select a different owner for the booking.
- Under Room Type Allocation, each of the room types selected by the sender are mapped to the corresponding room types at your property. If those room types aren't available, change them using the Lowest Group Available numbers and the Availability button to help you decide which rooms to select.
- Click Create Booking. The new booking opens in Prospect status, and the status of the inquiry automatically changes to Qualified.
- Go to the Guestroom section of the Booking page and click Details.
A room block is created based on the guestroom requirements specified in MeetingBroker.
- Update the room counts as needed and enter the appropriate rates (see Block guestrooms).
- Click Save.
- Click Function Diary at the top of the Booking page.
The booking events specified in the RFP details are created and placed in the Unassigned room.
- Click and drag each event to an available function room.
- Double-click each event to open the Quick Create window.
If you see "unknown" in your RFP Recap, or your events are created with blank event classifications or function room setups, your administrator needs to update the mapping of your setup values in MeetingBroker. See MeetingBroker Help.
- Change the default event name (for example, Event 1) to something more descriptive and enter the event's forecast and rental information, as needed. See Create events in the Function Diary.
- Click Save.
The Quick Create window closes and the name of the event is shown on the space block in the Function Diary. By default, the status of the event is set to correspond with the status of its associated booking (Red = Prospect; Blue = Tentative; Green = Definite).
- When you're ready to bid on the business, send a proposal.
Make sure the booking is fully detailed before you click Send Proposal. The bulk of the booking data is uploaded to the channel's website or the eProposal only the first time you click Send Proposal. Any updates you make to the booking after that will require you to manually enter them in both your booking and your proposal. By providing as much information as possible in the first proposal you send, you'll save time and avoid duplicate data entry.
Explore more...
Confirm receipt of RFP inquiries
Use Multi-Link to manually link inquiries to existing bookings