This is one of the busiest times every year for AFR on the hotel contracting side. We’ve made it past the holidays and the hangover of January, and now is the time most reunion chairs buckle down and get serious about this year’s reunion. Larger groups are already thinking about 2023 and beyond, and beginning to secure hotel contracts for a few years out.
If you haven’t narrowed down the cities you’re considering yet, that is your first step. Before you start to research hotels you want to narrow it down to no more than 3 cities. Otherwise, it may take months to find the right hotel for you. Even if you selected a certain city, there is still the long road ahead of researching, calling, and trying to negotiate with a bunch of hotels to see which ones will meet your “reunion-friendly” needs: free meeting space for the hospitality room along with the ability to provide your own snacks/beverages/alcohol, reasonable room rates and banquet prices, and many other concessions and discounts. If you’ve planned your reunion before, you know this is not an easy task. There aren’t more than 2 or 3 hotels in ANY city that will allow all of this, and quite a few cities have NO hotels that allow this.
Groups call us all the time after they’ve spent weeks, even months, trying to identify the right hotel for them. It can be a frustrating process going it alone, and even if you have local members to scout hotels, you still have no buying power with the hotels. After reaching out to AFR, you will likely have signed a hotel contract within a week or two with the best rates available and more concessions than you thought possible.
What if there was an “Easy Button” for identifying the most reunion-friendly cities and hotels? What if you could be connected directly with the hotels in any city nationwide that meet all the reunion-friendly requirements mentioned above? How much time would that save you? How many headaches?
AFR has booked thousands of reunion groups in over 150 cities for over 35 years. Over that time, we’ve developed amazing relationships and partnerships with hotels nationwide. We have trained them to appreciate veterans and the special needs of the reunion market, and they go out of their way to accommodate our groups’ needs. Hotels in our network accept AFR’s Military Reunion Hotel Contract that is Risk-Free and gains your group a long list of additional discounts and concessions.
Having Zero Risk in your hotel contract is more important in 2022 than it ever has been before. For many groups, it will be their first reunion since 2019 or maybe even 2018. If you met in 2021, there was probably a lot less attendees than in a normal year. So how many people do you expect in 2022?? Your guess is as good as ours. So to protect your association from costly penalties after the reunion, you really need to have no Room Attrition Clauses and no Food & Beverage Minimums in your hotel contract. It is very rare that a hotel will agree to this for groups that book on their own. Our hotel partners accept AFR’s contract terms knowing we’ll book multiple groups with them year after year.
Hit the “Easy Button” this year and head to http://www.bookmyreunion.com/top-destinations , click on the city you’re interested in, fill out the ‘Get A Proposal’ form and your information will be sent directly to AFR’s hotels partners in that city that offer Risk-Free contracts.