Group Sales
Hotel RFP Response Time: You're Watching the Wrong Clock
Ari Kuparipuro
Ask a hotel sales director how fast the team answers RFPs and you'll get a confident number. "Same day." "A couple of hours." Both can be true and still miss the point, because that number usually comes from the desk's clock: the time between someone opening the enquiry and someone replying to it.
The planner runs a different clock. It starts when they hit send, it doesn't pause for nights or weekends, and it keeps running while other hotels get the same request. Planners typically evaluate several properties at once, according to hotel sales intelligence firm M1 Intel, and the hotel that replies first "sets the frame for the comparison that follows."
That's why response time is a win-rate metric, not a service metric. One tells you how your team is doing. The other tells you whether you're still in the running.
Two clocks, one RFP
Picture an enquiry that lands at 17:30 on a Friday. Your desk opens Monday at 09:00 and sends a good, fast reply by 11:00. Your report says the team answered in two hours.
The planner waited roughly 65 hours.
Desk clock | Planner clock | |
|---|---|---|
Starts | When someone opens the enquiry | When the planner hits send |
Pauses | Nights, weekends, lunch | Never |
Measures | Team responsiveness | Your place in the comparison |
Predicts | Workload | Win rate |
Most hotels only report the left column. The right one is where the deal gets decided.
The planner clock is the one that predicts wins
The numbers behind this are consistent, even if the sources vary in rigour. M1 Intel reports that hotels that consistently respond to group RFPs within four hours see win rates 20 to 30 percentage points higher than those with same-day or next-day response times. Thynk.cloud reports that 79% of RFPs are won by one of the first three hotels to respond, though it doesn't cite a source for that figure, so read it as directional.
Speed alone doesn't win the business. Knowland's own guidance cautions that speed shouldn't be the single biggest factor in a hotel RFP, and it cites hospitality RFP win rates of 5 to 7%, against 44% across all industries. Price, availability, and relationship all still matter. But they only matter if you're in the comparison when it happens.
Then there's the clock that never stops at all. Groups360 puts the average hotel RFP response rate at around 45%, which leaves more than half of enquiries without a reply.
Where the planner clock actually runs
The desk clock hides three stretches of waiting.
Nights and weekends. More than 25% of Booking Engine bookings on MeetingPackage happen outside business hours. Those enquiries wait for the desk to reopen, and on the planner's clock, that wait counts.
The queue. An enquiry that arrives at 10:00 doesn't get answered at 10:00 if the team is working through yesterday's. "In the past, the RFP process for groups was extremely slow and frustrating for the customer. It could take two to three days before they even got a quote. That's not acceptable anymore," says Daniel Ljungqvist, Director of Sales Development at Strawberry Hotels. His colleague Fredrik Hult, Head of eCommerce, adds: "People are used to getting confirmations instantly. If they don't get that experience, they drop off."
The rebuild. Reading the request, retyping it into your systems, checking availability, and writing the proposal all happen before the reply goes out. Knowland describes a well-run hotel process as a reply within two to four hours. That's a good desk clock and a long planner clock.
How to measure the right clock
You don't need new software to start. You need a different stopwatch.
Timestamp the enquiry when it arrives, not when someone first opens it
Count elapsed hours, not business hours
Split results by arrival time: weekday daytime versus evenings and weekends
Compare win rate by response bucket: under four hours, same day, later
Run that for a quarter. The gap between your desk clock and your planner clock is the part of your win rate you can still change.
What shortens the planner clock
Once you can see the gap, it usually closes in three places.
Reading and re-keying is the first. MeetingPackage, the AI-enhanced Operating System for Groups, Meetings & Events, includes an AI Email Agent that reads inbound RFP emails, extracts the event details, and asks for anything missing in the customer's own language. It cuts processing from up to 60 minutes to seconds.
Skipping the queue is the second. For enquiries that fit rules you set in advance, Instant Quote checks live availability and pricing and sends a priced proposal back, day or night. Anything outside those rules goes to a person.
Skipping the RFP is the third. With a Booking Engine, small and mid-size meetings book straight from your website. Instant bookings on the platform convert at roughly 90%, against 10 to 20% for a traditional RFP. "We have seen that customers are ready to book small and mid-size meetings online, which creates nearly 80% of requests, supporting our sales team to focus on more bespoke and high-value business," says Amy Russell of PPHE Hotel Group.
The point isn't to take people out of the process. It's to stop spending their hours on the enquiries that only needed a fast, accurate answer, so they can focus on the bespoke business where a person changes the outcome.
For a closer look at where the hours go before a reply is even possible, see where the hours go before a reply is even possible.
See your planner clock
Most hotels already know how fast their desk is. Few know how long their planners wait. Book a demo and we'll look at your response times from the planner's side of the screen.
Ask a hotel sales director how fast the team answers RFPs and you'll get a confident number. "Same day." "A couple of hours." Both can be true and still miss the point, because that number usually comes from the desk's clock: the time between someone opening the enquiry and someone replying to it.
The planner runs a different clock. It starts when they hit send, it doesn't pause for nights or weekends, and it keeps running while other hotels get the same request. Planners typically evaluate several properties at once, according to hotel sales intelligence firm M1 Intel, and the hotel that replies first "sets the frame for the comparison that follows."
That's why response time is a win-rate metric, not a service metric. One tells you how your team is doing. The other tells you whether you're still in the running.
Two clocks, one RFP
Picture an enquiry that lands at 17:30 on a Friday. Your desk opens Monday at 09:00 and sends a good, fast reply by 11:00. Your report says the team answered in two hours.
The planner waited roughly 65 hours.
Desk clock | Planner clock | |
|---|---|---|
Starts | When someone opens the enquiry | When the planner hits send |
Pauses | Nights, weekends, lunch | Never |
Measures | Team responsiveness | Your place in the comparison |
Predicts | Workload | Win rate |
Most hotels only report the left column. The right one is where the deal gets decided.
The planner clock is the one that predicts wins
The numbers behind this are consistent, even if the sources vary in rigour. M1 Intel reports that hotels that consistently respond to group RFPs within four hours see win rates 20 to 30 percentage points higher than those with same-day or next-day response times. Thynk.cloud reports that 79% of RFPs are won by one of the first three hotels to respond, though it doesn't cite a source for that figure, so read it as directional.
Speed alone doesn't win the business. Knowland's own guidance cautions that speed shouldn't be the single biggest factor in a hotel RFP, and it cites hospitality RFP win rates of 5 to 7%, against 44% across all industries. Price, availability, and relationship all still matter. But they only matter if you're in the comparison when it happens.
Then there's the clock that never stops at all. Groups360 puts the average hotel RFP response rate at around 45%, which leaves more than half of enquiries without a reply.
Where the planner clock actually runs
The desk clock hides three stretches of waiting.
Nights and weekends. More than 25% of Booking Engine bookings on MeetingPackage happen outside business hours. Those enquiries wait for the desk to reopen, and on the planner's clock, that wait counts.
The queue. An enquiry that arrives at 10:00 doesn't get answered at 10:00 if the team is working through yesterday's. "In the past, the RFP process for groups was extremely slow and frustrating for the customer. It could take two to three days before they even got a quote. That's not acceptable anymore," says Daniel Ljungqvist, Director of Sales Development at Strawberry Hotels. His colleague Fredrik Hult, Head of eCommerce, adds: "People are used to getting confirmations instantly. If they don't get that experience, they drop off."
The rebuild. Reading the request, retyping it into your systems, checking availability, and writing the proposal all happen before the reply goes out. Knowland describes a well-run hotel process as a reply within two to four hours. That's a good desk clock and a long planner clock.
How to measure the right clock
You don't need new software to start. You need a different stopwatch.
Timestamp the enquiry when it arrives, not when someone first opens it
Count elapsed hours, not business hours
Split results by arrival time: weekday daytime versus evenings and weekends
Compare win rate by response bucket: under four hours, same day, later
Run that for a quarter. The gap between your desk clock and your planner clock is the part of your win rate you can still change.
What shortens the planner clock
Once you can see the gap, it usually closes in three places.
Reading and re-keying is the first. MeetingPackage, the AI-enhanced Operating System for Groups, Meetings & Events, includes an AI Email Agent that reads inbound RFP emails, extracts the event details, and asks for anything missing in the customer's own language. It cuts processing from up to 60 minutes to seconds.
Skipping the queue is the second. For enquiries that fit rules you set in advance, Instant Quote checks live availability and pricing and sends a priced proposal back, day or night. Anything outside those rules goes to a person.
Skipping the RFP is the third. With a Booking Engine, small and mid-size meetings book straight from your website. Instant bookings on the platform convert at roughly 90%, against 10 to 20% for a traditional RFP. "We have seen that customers are ready to book small and mid-size meetings online, which creates nearly 80% of requests, supporting our sales team to focus on more bespoke and high-value business," says Amy Russell of PPHE Hotel Group.
The point isn't to take people out of the process. It's to stop spending their hours on the enquiries that only needed a fast, accurate answer, so they can focus on the bespoke business where a person changes the outcome.
For a closer look at where the hours go before a reply is even possible, see where the hours go before a reply is even possible.
See your planner clock
Most hotels already know how fast their desk is. Few know how long their planners wait. Book a demo and we'll look at your response times from the planner's side of the screen.
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