Protect Your Conference Housing From Unauthorized Providers
June 20, 2019Housing poachers are more than just a headache for meeting planners: Unauthorized providers can lead to hotel attrition penalties and unhappy attendees who end up with subpar housing or none at all. Here’s how to prevent poaching and respond when it happens.
No problem is likely more irritating to your meeting planning staff than the issue of unauthorized housing providers, more commonly known as housing poachers or pirates. For those unfamiliar with this practice, an unauthorized housing provider may impersonate your association in an attempt to convince attendees to register or book meeting hotel rooms with it, rather than with your official housing agent of record.
Many are fly-by-night entities notoriously difficult to locate. In the worst cases, the unauthorized provider obtains the attendees’ payment information but makes no hotel reservation in return. In other cases, a reservation is made, but at a hotel that is less desirable than what was officially arranged in the room block.