CONFERENCE AND BANQUETING SYSTEMS

1. CONFERENCE AND BANQUETING SYSTEMS Chapter 9

2. INTRODUCTION • Conference and Banqueting Systems assist in managing and controlling reservations and billing in the hotel’s banqueting department. • Booking a conference room is far more complex than taking a normal reservation for a bedroom.

3. Conference rooms can usually be subdivided into different sub-units. • This makes accepting a booking complicated, because if a subsection has already been reserved, then the entire room cannot be sold to another client at the same time. • A Function Room can be sold several times each day. To allow this to happen, the conference and banqueting system uses hours instead of days as a booking time-frame.

4. Each booking has different set-up and clean-down times depending on the size of the room, type of meeting, and style of seating required. • A variety of other ‘reservations’ are dependent on the conference reservation. For example: food, beverage, audio-visual equipment, hotel room reservations, etc. • Co-ordination of these requirements means providing a list of them for each event to almost every other department of the hotel.

5. The key to a successful conference and banqueting reservation system is the bookings diary. • Rooms can be blocked off on the diary and different colours can be used to indicate different types of bookings. • Each block on the diary screen has an attached record which stores data on the client and on billing instructions, as well as food and beverage, and equipment needs.

6. Ability to track requests for equipment is very important, as there is generally a limited amount of equipment such as chairs, overhead projectors, etc. • If a shortage is foreseen, extra items can be rented or borrowed from outside sources. • Some systems also assist in the generation of graphical room layouts, and facilitate the production of seating plans and name tags.

7. Conference and Banqueting Systems also prevent operational mix-ups, such as trying to put a conference for 500 people in a room that can only accommodate 300. • The system also simplifies the management of regular bookings, e.g. A booking for 7pm on the first Monday of every month. • Billing of regular bookings is also greatly simplified.

8. Co-ordination in the conference area is improved by the use of a computerised system. • For example, summary lists of the equipment needed, and detailed lists of the equipment to be placed in each room for each event, can be printed to guide the staff setting up the rooms. • Food and Beverage reports showing service time and dishes required, can be accessed on the system.

9. Links with PMS allow the person taking the function booking to check on room availability and make a block booking for the conference participants. • The computerised system also assists with simplifying the process of billing the client.