Marriott International sent a tremor through the meetings and conventions industry when it announced that as of March 31, commissions to third-party planning companies would drop from 10 percent to 7 percent for group bookings in North America. In late March, Hilton Hotels & Resorts followed suit, announcing that it would drop commissions to 7 percent starting this fall.
This 3 percent shocker is clashing with an industry that has come to rely on hotel commissions to offset the costs of meeting management services and, in some cases, defray operational and personnel expenses on the client side. To understand the impact of the cuts, MeetingsNet set out to learn more about the commission landscape today. Who’s taking commissions, who’s sharing them, and how do they affect pricing?
We surveyed our readers and heard back from 477 meeting professionals, 303 from third-party planning companies and 174 from corporations and associations. Click on the links below to take you to the full results, via a pdf download or our digital edition.
