Meeting Planners and Travel Agents Prepare for a Reinvention Amid Hotel Commission Cuts
Photo Credit: An event at a Marriott hotel. Travel agents and meeting planners will have to adjust to a world with reduced hotel commissions. Flickr / Bart
Skift Take
Travel agents and meeting planners feel betrayed by Marriott’s – and now Hilton’s – move to cut commissions on group bookings. They’re grappling with ways to deal with the cuts, even as they fear more hotel companies may follow suit. It's not personal, though; it's strictly business.
Travel agents and meeting planners have remarkably similar views on recent moves by Hilton Worldwide and Marriott International to slash commissions for group bookings. It's hard to feel positive about your business partners reducing your compensation, even if tension has been building in the ecosystem over a period of decades.
The commission cuts from 10 to 7 percent—initiated by Marriott and followed just two months later by Hilton—are an assault on the giant hotel chains’ “trusted partners,” those indispensable to the chains’ distribution channels, said agents and planners who spoke to Skift.
They also aren’t buying the companies’ stated reasons for the cuts, which planner Christy Lamagna, CEO of Strategic Meetings & Events, called “heavily shrouded in spin.”
Marriott, whose cuts took effect on March 31, said it’s had concerns about funding technology expenses for an updated meetings booking platform, while Hilton’s decision is based on reducing
