MICE: what meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions mean for a hotel

EHL Hospitality Business School describes the four parts as follows. Beside each is what it usually asks of a hotel.

• Meetings: usually a single day, in a hotel's meeting room or a convention centre, where a company's people work through a problem or set their goals. Hotels usually quote them as a day price for each delegate, with the hall, lunch and tea in it.
• Incentives: a trip a company pays for to reward its staff, its dealers or its partners for good work. EHL says a few days at a resort or hotel paid for by the company builds loyalty. These guests expect something they couldn't buy for themselves: a private dinner, a tour, a welcome on arrival.
• Conferences: larger events over several days, where a big group shares what it knows, often with guest speakers and sometimes with the public. They need a main hall, smaller rooms beside it, many bedrooms on the same nights, and meals at fixed times.
• Exhibitions: trade fairs, where companies show what they sell. The hotels near the exhibition ground fill with exhibitors and visitors, even when the fair itself has no rooms to offer.

VisitEngland's glossary for the travel trade reads the E as events, and gives business tourism as another name for the whole of it. The meaning is the same: groups travelling for work, on dates set by someone else.

• The dates are fixed well ahead, so you know what is coming and can price the nights around it.
• Much of it falls on weekdays, and outside the wedding season, when fewer leisure guests travel.
• Each booking brings more than rooms: the hall's hire, meals, tea breaks, the bar, transfers and sometimes a gala dinner.
• A company that holds a good meeting with you often comes back the next year, and its people return on their own.
• EHL says MICE travellers spend considerably more than leisure travellers, and names IT, banking, pharmaceuticals, retail and hospitality among the industries they come from.

1. 1The enquiry: a company's admin or travel team, an event management company or a destination management company asks for dates, rooms for each night, the halls and the meals. It is often sent to several hotels at once.
2. 2The proposal: a group rate for the rooms on each night, the hall's hire or a day price for each delegate, the meals by menu or by price per plate, and your terms. Hold the dates as an option until a set day.
3. 3The contract: the rooms by night and type, the rate and what is in it, the halls and their times, the food, the deposit and when the rest is paid, the day unbooked rooms come back to you, and what is owed if numbers fall.
4. 4The rooming list: the names for each room, sent by an agreed day before arrival. Until then the rooms are held, not sold.
5. 5The final numbers: for meals and halls, a final count a few days before, which is what you charge for even if fewer turn up.
6. 6The bill: one master account for what the organiser pays, while each guest pays their own extras, as the contract says.

The IH&RA and UFTAA code of practice between hotels and travel agents says congresses, conferences, seminars, incentive tours and exhibitions may need a written agreement of their own. Its checklist for them reads like a list of what goes wrong when nothing is written down: cut-off dates, deposits, no-show charges, room-drop charges, the master account, the minimum numbers for food and drink, corkage, and the price of nights before and after the event.

• The room block: rooms by type for each night, the group rate, and whether breakfast and tax are included.
• The cut-off date: the day unbooked rooms in the block come back to you to sell, and whether the group rate still applies to bookings after it.
• Attrition: how far the group may fall below the rooms it contracted before it pays for the gap. Marriott Bonvoy Events defines attrition as the difference between the room nights contracted and those actually booked, and tells planners that falling short usually brings a fee.
• The halls: which hall, from what time to what time, how it is set out (rows, round tables, a U shape), the sound and the screen, and what each costs.
• Food and drink: the menus, the price per plate or per delegate, the day final numbers are due, and the number you charge for if fewer come.
• Free rooms: any rooms given free for the organiser or the group's leader, and for how many paid rooms.
• Payment: the deposit, when the balance is due, who pays what (the organiser's master account, or each guest), and the invoice details, with the company's name and GST number.
• Cancellation: what is owed if the event is cancelled, by how many days before it, and what counts as force majeure.

That sum, what a group brings against the guests it pushes out, is what hotels call displacement, and it is worth doing for every large enquiry.

• Give meetings a page on your website: each hall's size, how many it seats in rows and at round tables, the sound and screens, the day price for each delegate, and photos of a room set up.
• Write to the companies within a short drive, the event management companies in your city and the destination management companies that bring groups to your region.
• Reply to an enquiry the same day, with the dates you can hold, a price and an offer to visit. The first clear answer has the advantage.
• Find out months ahead what is on in your town: the conferences, fairs and exhibitions whose visitors need beds, and ask their organisers to list you.
• Keep one calendar of every date held, by whom and until when, so a held date is never sold twice.
• After each event, ask the organiser for a review and a line you may quote, and keep a list of every company you have hosted.