Instant Quote: Every RFP Answered in Minutes, On Your Rules

Instant Quote: Every RFP Answered in Minutes, On Your Rules

Speed decides most Groups, Meetings & Events RFPs before anyone gets to compare price, availability, or relationship. According to Thynk.cloud, 79% of RFPs are won by one of the first three hotels to respond. Hotels that reply within four hours see win rates 20 to 30 percentage points higher than those replying the same day or the next, according to hotel sales intelligence firm M1 Intel. And Groups360 puts the average hotel RFP response rate at only around 45% in the first place.

Put those together and the picture is uncomfortable: the business usually isn't lost on price. It's lost before anyone gets the chance to compete at all — because the RFP sat in an inbox over a weekend, or the sales team spends most of its day on admin instead of selling. Thynk.cloud's own research puts hotel sales teams at just 30% of their time actually selling; the rest goes to data entry, approvals, and chasing information.

"Every hour an RFP sits unanswered is an hour a competitor has to beat you to it. Instant Quote closes that hour to minutes."

Joonas Ahola - CEO, Founder

What Instant Quote actually does

Instant Quote is the newest product in MeetingPackage's AI-enhanced Operating System for Groups, Meetings & Events. Where the Booking Engine gives planners an instant answer on your website, and the AI Email Agent turns an inbound RFP email into structured data, Instant Quote does the part neither of those covers: it actually answers the RFP — checked against live availability, priced from your own rate codes, and sent back to the customer, without waiting for someone to open an inbox.

One-liner: every RFP answered with a real, priced proposal — in minutes, not days.

Here's how it fits alongside the rest of the platform:

Instant Quote is the natural next step after the AI Email Agent and the Channel Manager, both of which increase how many structured RFPs arrive. Instant Quote is what turns that volume into revenue instead of a longer queue.

How Instant Quote works

1. Capture. An RFP arrives from any connected source — a channel partner, your own Booking Engine, or the AI Email Agent's inbox.

2. Extract and enrich. Event details are pulled out and unstated requirements are filled in, so the enquiry arrives complete instead of half-finished.

3. Price against live inventory. Real-time availability and pricing — including dynamic, demand-based rates — come straight from your Sales & Catering system or PMS — your own rate codes and packages, not a simplified copy of them. 

4. Decide. Your own rules determine the path: quote automatically, decline politely, or hand the enquiry to a person.

5. Quote. A branded proposal and matching email go out in the customer's own language, with space held according to your hold policy.

6. Write back. Confirmed bookings, and anything flagged for manual review, get written back into your system of record. No double-keying, full audit trail.

See Instant Quote in action

On your rules, not a black box

The single biggest hesitation with automated quoting is trust: nobody wants software making promises on their behalf without a clear boundary. Instant Quote is built around that boundary rather than around it.

Two independent rule sets — decline and takeover — let you define exactly which enquiries the platform answers on its own, which it turns down, and which need a person. Today that's based on group size and event duration, with criteria like value, channel, and season on the roadmap. You also set what a declined customer sees, so a "no" still feels considered rather than automated.

And the platform refuses to guess. A property can't go live until a named person has verified its inventory data is accurate, and enablement is blocked outright while a required rate code is missing. If Instant Quote can't trust the data behind a quote, it won't send one.

"The easy version of this product would have been 'let the AI quote everything.' We didn't build that. Every venue defines exactly what Instant Quote can answer on its own, what it declines, and what goes to a person — and if the inventory data behind a quote hasn't been verified, it simply won't send one. Trust was the hard part to build, not the automation."

Can Ural - Director of Product and Engineering - Applications

Built to run across a portfolio, not just one property

Most automation tooling in this space is single-property thinking scaled up badly. Instant Quote was built the other way round, for teams managing more than one hotel:

• Baseline with per-property override. Set one organisation-wide rule set that every property follows by default, with a clean override where a property genuinely needs one. Properties still inheriting the baseline render read-only, so nobody edits a rule thinking it's local when it's actually estate-wide.

• Blast-radius visibility. The baseline states its own reach in plain language — followed by how many properties today — and every properties list carries a live count of how many are on the standard setting versus customised.

• Enablement as its own deliberate step. Configuring the rules never switches auto-quoting on anywhere. Every enablement change needs its own explicit confirmation, and switching a property off is a red, unmistakable action. Nothing that touches revenue happens quietly.

• Portfolio-scale rollout. Switch a filtered segment on or revert it in one action instead of property by property, with anything blocked by a safety guard reported rather than silently skipped.

• A full configuration change log. Every change — organisation or property level, switched on, switched off, overridden, reverted — is logged with who, what, and when.

• Rights that match the risk. Editing the rules and the on/off switch are governed separately, so a property team can be trusted to turn their own hotel on without being able to rewrite the estate's standard.

For a revenue or distribution leader, that's the part that actually matters: you can set a standard centrally and still see exactly which properties diverge from it, and why.

What changes for your team

Hotel sales teams already feel the problem Instant Quote is built for. "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, puts the customer side of it plainly: "People are used to getting confirmations instantly. If they don't get that experience, they drop off."

Instant Quote is built to close exactly that gap, on three fronts:

You win the enquiries you were losing to speed. Being first to respond is one of the strongest predictors of winning an RFP, and Instant Quote makes you first — including nights and weekends, when nobody's watching the inbox.

Your team gets its time back. The long tail of routine, smaller enquiries stops eating the day. That time moves to the complex, negotiated business where a person genuinely changes the outcome — not the enquiries that just needed a fast, accurate answer.

You answer everything, not just what you get to. Coverage moves from "the RFPs we managed to reach" to all of them, including the ones that would otherwise have sat unanswered until the customer booked somewhere else.

None of this asks you to hand your rates to a machine. You write the rules once; the platform executes only inside them, at machine speed, across the whole portfolio. Anything outside those rules gets declined or routed to your team, and every rule change is logged with who made it and when.

Part of a proven platform

Instant Quote sits alongside a Booking Engine already trusted by hotel groups including, Scandic, Leonardo, and PPHE Hotel Group, and an eProposal product with six Hotel Tech Report Awards behind it. It's built on the same principle as the rest of the MeetingPackage platform: combine online booking, proposals, distribution, and reporting in one system, instead of asking your sales team to stitch several tools together by hand.

If an enquiry needs more than Instant Quote can offer on its own — a bespoke request, a complex negotiation, anything your rules route to a person — it lands in eProposal, MeetingPackage's branded, interactive proposal page, so your team still has a fast, professional way to close it.

See it on your own portfolio

The RFPs your team is losing right now aren't being lost to a better offer. They're being lost to a faster one. Book a demo to see how Instant Quote would price, decide, and answer against your own rules — and your own portfolio.