Bringing Life to
Meetings & Events

CONFERENCE PLANNING RESOURCES
2020 CALAMOS COURT
SUITE 200
NAPERVILLE, IL 60563
(630) 799-1584

FAQS

At CPR, we are:

  • Committed full-time: We are W-2 statutory employees. As such, we are not independent contractors and we all work at CPR full time (24/7, 7 days a week).
  • Specialists: A boutique organization with very tight and high standards and SOP.
  • Client-service experts: We take a true account management approach. We have people assigned to every account (a primary contact and a secondary contact as a backup).
  • Transparent: Planners see the bills with all of the final, accurate numbers from the hotel, DMC, etc. We don’t pad anything with any payments to CPR. The client knows exactly what a service or product costs as it comes from the vendor itself, not from us.
  • Independent: Not a hotel representation firm. As such, we aren’t limited to the hotels we contact. We can send the client’s RFP to any hotel that will agree not to increase any hotel pricing (room rates or otherwise) because of our involvement. I have worked with companies that work with both a hotel representation firm and us. I can cover all the hotels that aren’t on their list of retained properties, ensuring we have researched all qualified hotels.
  • Truly cost-free: Not charging the client for anything, at any time.
  • By reducing room and event-space rates: We understand how to reach a hotel’s threshold without crossing it.
  • By winning additional concessions: We don’t stop at negotiating down the room and event-space rates as low as possible. We continue negotiating to win additional concessions that save our clients money. This could include more discounted staff rooms, more upgrades, and more complimentary rooms. We also get creative in cost saving requests–for instance, waiving bartender fees with a certain dollar spend at the bar, reducing or comping the cost of staging, capping hang point charges, reducing or comping the costs of coffee and high-speed internet access connections in meeting rooms, and myriad of other area. We focus on all areas in which the hotel could be perceived as “nickel and diming” customers.
  • By securing outside sponsorship: We also always try to find eligible rebate money, financial booking incentives, where others might not look. We have releationships with other stakeholders in many destinations where you might want to book your next conference that can provide additional monies to help off-set your conference expenses. Often, this information is not published, but we find it. Free money! Who doesn’t like that?
  • By negotiating price control clauses: When signing a contract several years out, we work to ensure items like food costs are capped year over year.
  • By protecting clients from costly liabilities: Beyond savings, we also help protect groups from potential liabilities with our contractual clauses.
  • By leverage our relationships with have with hotels’ global sales offices: When working with CPR, we can give our clients access to the support of a global sales office contact with Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Omni, Loews, Four Seasons, etc.

Some of our clients have an in-house meeting planning department and a full legal team. They still use us because we’re able to squeeze more out of the hotels than they can manage on their own. Combined buying power helps us accomplish this task.

CPR doesn’t step on any toes, and we won’t come between you and any hotel contact with whom you have a relationship. We can simply step back once the RFP is issued and assist in whatever ways you need us. We will provide any support that you might need in terms of setting up sites or negotiating contracts, but we’ll be as hands-on or as hands-off as you wish.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe the contract could be tighter, be better for you. Maybe those hotels have gotten complacent in their offers to you since they know they will be getting the business. Let us contact competing hotels on your behalf to 1) demonstrate what we can do in terms of the services we provide and 2) motivate the property you have always used to sharpen their pencils, knowing that they must now compete for and earn your business. Introducing healthy competition can only help you.

 
We work with many companies that have legal depts. Most legal departments are very adept in specific areas, but they aren’t savvy with hotel contracts. In many cases, our clients’ legal departments have reviewed our contract revisions and advised the planner that if all contracts looked like ours, they wouldn’t need to spend as much time reviewing the contracts moving forward. That ends up saving our clients money since they don’t have to pay as much for legal counsel’s time.

Hotels need to maintain rate integrity with their competitors in the marketplace. As such, they simply cannot lower their rates beyond a certain point. Hotels and hotel brands all have a pool of money set aside to pay companies like ours a marketing services fee. In paying us to refer business to them, they don’t have to hire additional salespeople with full time salaries plus benefits. So we provide significant value to the hotel community by bringing them business, even though we act independently.

At first, many meeting planners find it hard to believe that the hotel rates are not impacted by our involvement. However, the hotels put it in writing both during the bid process and within the contracts that rates are not impacted, and we can verify and prove that that’s the case. That’s one of the ways in which we demonstrate full disclosure and transparency.

Our number one priority is to protect the integrity ensuring your getting the best possible hotel pricing, in all areas, the best concessions, and the best contract language designed to benefit your organization. Very simple, without you, not having any projects for us to work, we are out of business.

Naturally, we can in unison with any existing system(s) your currently utilizing to further enhance the end result.
However, hotels compliment our agency with our the menthods of communication telling us its more effective getting our client what they need, versus the exisiting platform our client might have been utilizing to communicate with a hotel. Often, we find our action steps actually help our client get a faster response, and their request for proposal taken more serious, having more credibility, verus other methods clients might have utilizing.

“As a corporate meeting planner who also has responsibility for trade shows, sample programs, catalog production and special marketing projects, I need reliable business partners that can help me with the details.

CPR℠ has been our source for location searches, contract negotiation and expert meeting advice for the past three years. They have consistently provided me with excellent choices during the search process and have on many occasions joined me on site trips.

Their expertise in contract negotiation has saved my company thousand of dollars on room rates, meeting room fees and food & beverage.

Since we are a major supplier to the hotel industry, we always want to use our good customers for our meeting locations. This can sometimes be difficult during the negotiation process. CPR℠ provides a perfect solution that has been a benefit to our customer relations as well as a way to control meeting costs.”

Jeffery S. Powell
Marketing & Promotion Manager
Edward Don & Company