Event Budgets and Hotel Contracts

Rosalind Kettering, NANA's director of meetings and events, teaches this course with Paloma Irigoyen, director of events at the Mountain States Ski Area Operators Council, who negotiates hotel contracts from a ski-lodge conference room in Denver. Between them they've signed room blocks ranging from a 40-person chapter roundtable to the 1,000-plus-attendee Summit.

Where attrition, cancellation, and cutoff clauses sit in a standard hotel contract, and the pickup percentage below which an association starts owing the hotel for unsold rooms. Rosalind Kettering shows how NANA's own Summit contracts have handled this clause over the years.

How hotels set F&B minimums against a room block's size, and how to negotiate one down when a meeting draws heavily on outside catering or off-site dinners.

Separating an event's fixed costs, venue, AV, staff travel, from its per-attendee costs, meals, materials, badges, so a budget scales correctly whether 150 or 300 people register. The course provides a template that carries both cost types as separate rows.

A worksheet for scoring two or more hotel proposals on total contracted cost rather than headline room rate, including the room-block math Paloma Irigoyen uses to compare Denver and Salt Lake City venues.

Meetings and events staff, chapter event coordinators, and finance staff who review event contracts before signing, especially anyone negotiating a hotel contract for the first time. Bring an unsigned proposal if you have one; the course reviews attrition math against a live example rather than a sample contract. Pairs with the Event Budget and Hotel Contract Toolkit.

• Calculate a room block's attrition exposure at a given pickup rate

• Negotiate a food-and-beverage minimum against projected attendance

• Build an event budget that separates fixed costs from per-attendee costs

• Compare two hotel proposals on total contracted cost, not just room rate