Before We Start

What We're Building

Today, we're going to build an event with a basic Request For Proposal (RFP).

If you like, you can check out the final RFP here: Basic RFP **Link to RFP**. Don't worry if it doesn't make sense yet, we'll be learning how to build this RFP step by step throughout this tutorial.

Prerequisites

Before you can start the tutorial you'll need to have a site ID set up, you can do so by submitting the site ID request form found here.

Help, I'm Stuck

If you ever get stuck let us know and we'll be glad to help you out. The best way to contact us with any questions is to login to the GPS application and click the red circle with a white question mark, in the bottom right of a GPS page.

Sourcing

What Is Sourcing

GPS makes it easy for event planners to efficiently source hotels based around an event venue, submit RFPs, compare bids, and contract room blocks within a single integrated application.

What Is An RFP

An RFP list your event's details and room requirements to a property. The property fills in the request and submits an RFP that list room rates for you to review. If both parties agree to rates, compensation, and other fields the RFP becomes a bid with bookable room block.

Getting Started

To get started you will need to click the Create New RFP link. You can find this link on the Dashboard under the Quick Links section, or on any page in the left navigation bar.

Creating An RFP

To start we require some General Information about your event, the required fields are represented by a red asterix (*). The following is the required information that you'll need to complete the RFP:

  • General Information (Name of Event, Type of Event, History of Event)
  • Room Information (Preferred bedding type, Typical Number of Guests in Each Room)
  • Site ID (Basically the Account Number for your event. Each event will have its own Unique Site ID. If a Site ID is used for multiple events it can cause issues, as all contracted hotels will show on one site.)
  • Rooming List Access
  • Method of Payment
  • Check-In Details
  • Close To Bids Date
  • Primary Venue

Event Overview

We're going to fill in the Event Overview section of the RFP, it gathers some basic information about your event:

Name of Event, the name of your event is one of the main ways to identify an event, so when you create your event's name here are a couple of things to keep in mind will this event have sleeping accommodations for boys and girls? Will this event occur annually? Will this event be named the same, but occur in different locations? Here's the title of the event that I came up with:

2018 Off The Wall Basketball

Our client's name will be John Doe.

For the type of event we're going to select Sports Team - Youth

We've got a pretty big event, so we're going to contract with multiple properties.

Here's our History for our event:

The tournament will feature 32 teams (16 boy’s teams and 16 girl’s teams) competing in a single elimination game format.  Although teams will be eliminated from a championship after 1 loss, a consolation bracket will be established guaranteeing that all teams will play 3 games. Off the wall is returning to Orlando for it's 9th consecutive year.

The National Championship Division will consist of teams invited from all over the country to play in a very competitive bracket with, hopefully, some of the best teams in the country. 

This is what our General Information looks like:

Now we can move on to providing some room information, we'll want to keep as many team members in a room as possible, so we'll request a range of bedding types: Doubles, Kings with sleepers, and regular Kings.

We expect to be able to have about three team members per room.

We'll need to select a site ID, if you're working with a lot of events you can request that multiple site IDs at one time. We've already created a site ID, so all we have to do is use the search functionality in the drop down to find the exact one we want to use.

We don't want the properties that we're going to contract with to have access to the rooming list until after the room blocks are released, so we're going to choose the Send on block release date radio option.

We want our team members to pay for their rooms upfront, so we've selected Individual Pays

Adding Details And Compensation

Next we'll be adding some basic event details and providing our compensation requirements.

Our event is Friday through Sunday, so our check-in date will be Friday.

We plan to fly out on Monday, so we'll need rooms for three nights in total.

This is a fairly large event and we expect about a 3000 team members a night, and three team members in each room, so we'll request a 1000 rooms. 

Our event is in December, so we'll want all RFPs submitted before then. Let's set our Closed to Bids date for the end of September.

Compensation Information

We're running a business, so we want to get compensated for our time and effort, but we also want to provide the best rates possible to our group. We'll require that the property provide us with the lowest public rate, and set that a 10% commission be paid from the property after the event has ended.

Complementary Rooms

We've got coaches, referees, and other staff members that need sleeping accommodations during the event. As we have such a large event we should be able to generate enough room nights to cover these accommodations, but let's require that the property provide us with a couple of rooms up front to be considered to participate.

Adding Venue(s)

We're almost done filling out our details that will be sent in the RFP. The last thing that we need to do is to add where our event will be taking place, we need to add this so that we can request rooms from properties that are nearby. Our event is going to take place at ESPN Wide World of Sports, let's add that information, and click save venue. The latitude and longitude will get generated for us.

Excellent, everything looks good! Let's move on to sending our first RFPs. We can click Save & Continue to be taken to the Send RFP page, or we can use the Mange Event menu to navigate to the Send RFP page.

Sending An RFP

Now that we've created the content that will populate our RFPs, we can select a couple of properties to send them to. I'll be using my contact information in this stage of the tutorial, but if you're following along and have created a real event, then you'll want to use the real contact information for a property.

Selecting Properties

We're going to scroll down to the Send RFP section, and select the three closest properties from our venue.

Great, all of our properties are less than a mile away from the event's primary venue, all of our participants should be able to make it to the venue without any delays.

Now all that we need to do is hit the send button and wait for the property to fill out our RFP and negotiate the details.

We'll be able to track the status of our RFPs in the Delivered RFP section.

Comparing Bids

Now that we've sent off our RFPs to properties that we're interested in contracting with, we just sit back and wait for properties to get back to us. If you sent it to yourself, like I did, then you'll need to fill it out before we can move on. Once they do we'll receive an email notification that an RFP is Pending Review. All of our active bids will be listed on the Compare Bids page.

Review RFP Response

All right, we've got a couple of bids back. Newly submitted RFPs show as Pending Review, each property list some general information about the response from the property, and we can click View RFP Response under the properties name to see all of the details on the RFP. We can now easily see the number of rooms available that we can block from each property, and compare them.

Let's look at all of the details submitted, so we don't miss anything, and accept our first property. Click the View RFP Response, and accept our first bid.

Accept/Decline RFP

Everything looks good to me, so let's click the Accept Bid button. Once the bid is accepted the status will change to Accepted and Validated, we now have contracted block with this property, and we'll be able to allow our guest to place reservations in these room blocks. Great, now we can start booking reservations and managing our block.