5 Ways to Align Your Hotel and CVB Partners to Maximize Success

By: Travis Pham, CMP , Senior Director, Strategic Accounts & Partnerships

Travis, here! 👋 I’m excited to share some insights with you today in my role as 360 Destination Group’s Senior Director of Strategic Accounts and Partnerships. Our Strategic Account Management (SAM) teams’ focus is on building deeper relationships with our customers while fostering connection and collaboration with our partners. After all, the recipe for any successful program includes a not-so-secret ingredient: seamless coordination. Our COO, Craig Caron , recently wrote a great article about the synergy between supplier and venue partners. Today, I’ll dive into how to set yourself, your hotel, and Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) partners up for success.

1. Loop Partners in Early

Communication is the key to seamless collaboration, so before you start sourcing a destination or hotel, talk to your DMC partners! No one wants a noisy inbox or yet another long meeting on their schedule, so before you start pulling everyone in, work with your destination partner to shape an itinerary aligned with your program goals. Then, we can take the next step and work with our hotel and CVB partners to create a truly unique and tailored experience. In addition to streamlining the overall planning process, early collaboration can also lead to significant cost savings. Since we work intimately with hotels and CVBs at 360DG, we can easily identify incentives, take advantage of a city’s need periods, and access special hotel promotions for groups. A proactive approach ensures you get the best value for your budget.

2. Go to Those in the Know

One of the biggest benefits of working with DMC partners is leveraging our local expertise. But we couldn’t stay ahead of the curve on what’s hot and what’s not without our trusty CVB partners! These folks live and breathe the latest and greatest and are proactive in sharing unique attractions, hip happenings, and cool cultural insights with us. Their pulse of the city mixed with our operational knowledge of the destination, vendors, and hotels ensures that your event is not just good, but exceptional. At 360DG, our SAM team can recommend suppliers that fit your needs and are pre-vetted for operational excellence. Oh, and since our vendors love us as much as we love them, we’ll also get you the best services at the most competitive rates.

3. Streamline & Amplify Your Event Promotion

This one may seem unconventional, but partnering with hotels and CVBs on program marketing is a fantastic way to divide and conquer! Whether you’re promoting your event internally or externally, you’ll inevitably need to spice up your materials with a lot of local flavor. By partnering closely with CVBs and hotels, your DMC can collect all the latest materials — like images, videos, brochures, and maps — that you need to make your chosen destination (or destinations!) enticing. Want to showcase specific group activities? We can do that, too!

When it comes to spreading the word, collaborative marketing is the name of the game. If your program is public-facing, why not partner with the hotel and CVB to develop a joint marketing strategy? In this case, teamwork really can make the dream work when it comes to increasing the visibility of your event and attracting a larger audience.

4. Centralize Your Communication for Seamless Logistical Coordination

As your DMC partners, one of our primary goals is to remove ‘cat herder’ from your list of responsibilities for good. When you work with a DMC with deep hotel and CVB partnerships, they become a hub of information and the main point of contact. We’ll keep everyone in the know and on the same page, making every step of planning and production much more manageable. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities, we produce a well-organized and successful event. Meticulous management of the production schedule ensures streamlined coordination with hotels and CVBs, integrating and aligning everything perfectly. From arranging CVB welcome greeters at the airport to communicating peak arrival times to the hotel front desk staff, we are proud to be the maestros who keep this beautiful dance moving without missing a beat.

5. Create a Collective Contingency Plan

At 360DG, we don’t just hope for the best, we plan for the worst. We ensure your event will be exceptional no matter what the world throws at us. Our SAM team’s extensive risk management and crisis response experience comes into play as we develop and implement comprehensive contingency plans. Again, as DMC partners and your friends on the front lines, we’ll work closely with our hotel and CVB partners to address potential issues, ensuring your event runs smoothly despite any challenges. We’re embedded in the destinations we serve, which means we know when a crisis occurs before it hits the headlines or social media and can swiftly respond and follow through with our plan B (or C or D).

At 360DG, connecting and collaborating between planners, hotels, and CVBs gets us out of bed in the morning. With the right DMC partners on your side, anything is possible. Have questions about how our SAM team can help you with your next event? Want to grab a coffee and talk partner strategy? Shoot me a note; I’d love to fill you in and hear all about it.