Dateline: 02-03-2010

Hotel Update - Feb 02 2010

As many know, the Sheraton is full and reservations are now being secured at the Sofitel located right across the street. The Sofitel is honoring the CONvergence room rate.

Room reservation requests are sent into the Sheraton in batches of 50 at a time. This keeps from overloading the Sheraton's system with incoming requests, allows for confirmations to be sent to our guests, and allows for guest time to respond with pertinent room guarantee information. these requests are forwarded to the hotel in the same first-come - first served basis as they are received.

During the week of 01/25/2010 the first 50 names received were forwarded to the Sheraton, and as the CONvergence process from end to end is new, AND we have a new reservations person at the hotel, we paused to see how things were working. And as many know, there was a bit of a snafu. No reservations were lost, but too many confirmation letters were sent. The Sheraton's system is set up to send 1 confirmation letter per guest, which means that for any room in which it was noted there would be more than 1 person staying, a confirmation was sent for each. So, if a reservation listed 3 adults for the room, three confirmation letters wee sent. This is not a change, we discovered, but rather how their system is set up. Previous reservations associates at the Sheraton automatically compensated for this, and trained their successor to do the same. This past year, our reservations person left and did not have the opportunity to train their successor.

In addition to the multiple room confirmations, it was also discovered that the rate listed was incorrect. The CONvergence hotel team was alerted very early on, and has been in contact with the Sheraton In-house Group Reservations Associate. Adding to the verbal discussion of fixes, we forwarded a copy fo last year's confirmation letter for their associate to use as a guide. The Sheraton Associate almost immediately revamped the first fifty letters tht had been sent, re-sent a new version, correcting both the muliplicity issue and the room rate issue. Thankfully, our system has always been to forward names to the Sheraton in batches. Had we sent all of the requests we have at one time, this would have been a much larger situation to correct.

So here's what happens going forward. Another batch of names will be forwarded to the Sheraton either this date or tomorrow. These will be request (NOT HOTEL!!!) confirmation numbers 4239 - 4290. Starting next week, names will be forwarded twice each in batches of 50, starting with request confirmation number 4291. At that pace, we anticipate all requests will be in to the Sheraton by, at the very latest, mid-March.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact the CONvergence Hotel Team at hotel@convergence-con.org.