The Hidden Cost of Email and Excel in Groups, Meetings & Events

Ask a hotel sales team what slows down Groups, Meetings & Events and the answer sounds like a time problem: too many emails, too many tabs, too many hours. The hotel leaders behind a recent industry white paper describe something bigger. The hours are the visible cost. The expensive part is what the process stops you from seeing.

The paper, Rethinking M&E Revenue Management, comes from recruitment firm Edwards & Finn. It draws on four roundtables chaired by Heather Hart, with contributors from Marriott International, Radisson Hotel Group, PPHE Hotel Group, Clermont Hotel Group, Klarent Hospitality and others. On technology, they agreed. Russell Low, Group Director of Revenue Management at Klarent Hospitality, put it like this:

"[Groups, Meetings & Events] technology isn't keeping pace. The systems we use aren't intuitive, and they rely heavily on manual processes. Reporting is clunky, and there's no clear integration with Property Management Systems, making optimisation almost impossible."

Here is where that bill shows up, in their words, plus what a year of industry progress has and hasn't changed.

Your pricing logic lives in a spreadsheet the system can't see

The white paper's diagnosis is specific. Sales & Catering systems lack built-in inventory controls, so unlike a PMS for bedrooms, they can't directly apply pricing and capacity restrictions. Manual selling strategy documents, it says, "sit outside the system or simply do not exist at all."

So the rules live in an Excel file, or in someone's head. Niamh Malone, Meetings and Events Revenue and Pricing Manager at PPHE Hotel Group, draws the obvious conclusion: "If we can do this manually in Excel using data, I don't see why it can't be automated."

Radisson went and did it. Christine Wassell, Senior Director of Meeting and Events Revenue Optimisation there, describes an internal system that consolidates pricing and proposals, "eliminating manual processes like using Excel sheets." Russell Low adds the cost of not doing so: even hotels in the same portfolio end up managing their data and bookings inconsistently. When the rules sit in a spreadsheet, every quote is only as consistent as the person who builds it.

Every re-keyed detail is a chance to be wrong

An RFP arrives as an email. Someone reads it, pulls out the dates, delegate numbers, room set-up, F&B and budget, and types them into a spreadsheet, a CRM, maybe a Sales & Catering system. By MeetingPackage's own estimate, that takes a sales team 30 to 60 minutes per email. We've mapped where those hours go.

The minutes are the small cost. The paper describes standalone systems and heavy manual data entry, which result in "poor data quality, inefficiencies, errors, and unreliable outcomes." Sally Booth, UK Group Strategy Director at Marriott International, explains the mechanism: "It's just very manual. It relies on that person understanding the situation and entering the data correctly. If they don't, the decision-making becomes flawed."

Reporting inherits the flaw. Wassell notes that recommendations and reports "are often based on substandard data." A report can only be as good as what someone typed in at 5pm on a Thursday.

The desk chases what's easy, not what's valuable

The paper links disconnected systems to a familiar pattern: manual data entry and analysis get worse when venues focus on smaller bookings with short lead times, instead of prioritising larger, more profitable events. An inbox rewards whatever is quickest to answer.

The people doing the work feel it. Jonathon Liu, Chief Commercial Officer at Verdi Hotels: "We try and have one person do everything, from finding that business lead, through to contracting, through to managing the details like dietary requirements and timings. But there are so many different skills involved, and they're all very different." Stuart Yeates, Chief Commercial Officer at Clermont Hotel Group, says staff "are expected to make significant commercial decisions, sometimes turning down bookings worth tens of thousands of pounds."

Those are judgment calls. Nobody should spend them on copying details between windows.

You can't fix the business you never recorded

According to the paper, lost and cancelled bookings "are often unrecorded, making predictions even harder." The enquiries that went nowhere leave no trace in a sent folder.

Our own audience data points the same way. In a live poll at MeetingPackage's Roadshow webinar (8 October 2026), 76% of European respondents said they don't know what share of their enquiries arrive outside business hours. In the same session, 76% of European respondents and 88% of US respondents said they still send proposals as PDF or Word files by email. These are small samples, so read them as directional. For reference, more than 25% of bookings through MeetingPackage are made outside business hours. An attachment in a sent folder records that something was sent. It doesn't record what happened next.

This matters more now than a year ago. The paper's 2026 follow-up reports that the industry has agreed six core metrics: Revenue per Square Metre (RevPAM), Revenue per Delegate, Revenue per Event, Lead Time, Delegate Density and Conversion. The same paper names data capture and data quality as the next job, so the metrics "don't live in spreadsheets but actively guide pricing, diary management, and acceptance decisions." Our reading: Lead Time and Conversion are the two an email-and-Excel desk will struggle with most, because both depend on every enquiry being logged, including the ones that don't convert.

Hotels are moving, starting with the smaller enquiries

There is good news. The follow-up describes a "clear shift away from spreadsheet-led approaches toward more consistent, system-supported workflows," with automation now a practical answer for many smaller enquiries. Larger, more bespoke events still need manual input. Wassell's view: automation and AI can handle low-value enquiries, "freeing staff to focus on high-yield opportunities."

The paper also names the catch. Progress depends on deeper integration between enquiry platforms, PMS and Sales & Catering systems, and without it "the benefits of automation will remain uneven across portfolios." Low makes the same point from the booking side: without integration, even "basic tasks like simple bookings become unnecessarily manual and fragmented." (We've written about why integrations are where the complexity of hotel tech lives.)

What replaces the spreadsheet

MeetingPackage is the AI-enhanced Operating System for Groups, Meetings & Events, and its CRS is built for exactly this gap. Every enquiry lands in one place, whether it arrived online, offline, directly or through a distribution channel. Each has a status, an owner, a history of what was agreed and when, and automatic reminders, so follow-up doesn't live in someone's memory.

Two-way integrations with PMS and Sales & Catering systems, including Oracle Opera, Mews and Infor, mean details are entered once instead of re-keyed. Around that core:

• AI Email Agent reads inbound RFPs, extracts the event details, asks for anything missing in the customer's language, and submits a structured request. Up to 60 minutes becomes seconds.

• eProposal replaces the PDF attachment with one branded, interactive link. Venues see a 5x faster proposal process and 3x higher RFP-to-booking conversion.

• Performance Insights shows where enquiries were lost and why, with response times and results by venue.

Katariina Kiiski of Hotel U14, a Marriott Autograph Collection property, says the result "brings transparency, speed, and reliability to the entire process, freeing up time for the team and improving the customer experience."

None of this replaces your sales team. Bespoke, high-value events still need a person. The point is to give that person the time, and the data, to sell them. For a stage-by-stage view of what automation should and shouldn't touch, see where AI actually earns its place in hotel event sales.

Start with one enquiry

Pick any RFP from last week and trace it: where it arrived, who retyped it, where the price came from, where the proposal went, and whether the outcome was recorded anywhere. That's your hidden cost, enquiry by enquiry. Book a demo and we'll show you what the same enquiry looks like without the re-keying.