Unscrupulous Group Travel Companies Stealing Your Attendees
As if it’s not difficult enough to fill room blocks these days, we now have outside travel firms attempting to look like official travel vendors for shows. This has most likely been going on for a while, but the problem of rogue group travel companies attempting to snag attendees away from booking hotel rooms within your room block is worsening. More and more I’m seeing these companies buying Google AdSense keywords for names of tradeshows in an attempt to book rooms for attendees outside the organizers block.
But it doesn’t stop there. Looking at the ad itself, and then clicking over to the group travel company site, an attendee might think they ARE booking in the block because the travel company makes it seem like they are an official vendor of the show. It’s happening at the moment to The International Traders Expo (the first tradeshow I lanched and later sold), but I saw it happening to another newer tradeshow I attended as well.
See the screenshot below (click on the image for full-size):
Click on that ad and you see this (click on the image for full-size):
In this particular instance the company is HDMC. Come on HDMC, long-term this is not good for our industry or YOUR business. If we can’t fill our room blocks and have to pay attrition because you’ve duped our attendees into booking elsewhere, eventually we’ll stop doing the event - and you’ll have less and less conferences from which you can poach hotel rooms.
Hotel executives: how about helping us out and by NOT taking reservations from the worst of these violators?
February 6th, 2008 at 8:26 am |
Sorry to hear you’re getting pirated, Tim. Definitely not a new problem–I wrote about it back in 2003 (here’s the link: http://tinyurl.com/2jku4w ). This has to be maddening to show organizers! Here are some suggestions from the article–they may or may not be useful here and now, but what the heck:
Seed your membership and exhibitor directories with false names connected to a staff member’s home address or some permutation of the office’s address, so you’ll know if someone is communicating with your attendees or exhibitors without your knowledge.
Plug your meeting’s name into some search engines. If that event pops up on someone else’s Web site and appears to affiliate your organization with that site, you have another trail to follow.
Send a “cease and desist” letter, and follow up with a threat of taking legal action, if necessary. One way is to claim “tortious interference” of a contractual relationship between your group and the hotel with which you contracted the housing block.
Register trademarks for show names, conference names, and organization names. To learn more, go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site: http://www.uspto.gov.
Put an audit clause in your contract. The clause should ensure that the organization gets credit for all group attendees, regardless of the rate they paid.
Create a value for staying inside the block. Educate attendees and exhibitors about the importance of staying inside the block, then add an incentive, preferably in hard dollars.
Tie registration and housing together in some way. Take away the option of going outside the block by providing a discount in the meeting registration to those who do the housing through you. Then if the poachers come, who cares? The attendees’ housing is already spoken for.
February 6th, 2008 at 8:29 am |
All great suggestions Sue - thanks a million for the comment. The quotes by these companies in your article are nuts. I see now it HAS been going on for a long time! I guess the Internet just makes it that much easier for them to reach attendees by buying the tradeshow name as a keyword.
Tim