Visit Detroit Revs Up with Meetingmax

The Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (Visit Detroit) announced today the signing of an agreement with Meetingmax Systems. Visit Detroit will now be able to offer meeting planners a simple tool to manage hotel room bookings for large-scale events held in the city.

“Offering housing support is essential in attracting conventions and groups to The D,” said John Francis, Manager, Sports and Destination Support, Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau. “While we have used a number of housing products in the past, we hadn’t found a vendor that could meet all of our needs. Meetingmax’s system is the best I have seen - it is easy to use and extremely cost-effective.”

Visit Detroit was looking for a system that could help meeting planners manage blocks of hotel rooms in the region’s 250 hotels. Instead of having to use each hotel’s system to track bookings, a meeting planner can secure blocks of housing through Visit Detroit and then manage their bookings through one central portal. Conference attendees are sent a link which allows them to explore participating hotels and book their own rooms.

“For a meeting planner, housing is the single largest headache and is often a deal breaker when selecting a destination,” says Jeff Duncan, COO, Meetingmax Systems. “Our system offers hotels, planners, and CVBs a powerful and customizable tool that makes it easy to manage their inventory.”

One of Visit Detroit’s challenges lay in the fact that it didn’t have a consistent annual volume of housing reservations. Some years it had a large number of conventions requiring the service, while other years it did not. While other products require CVBs to meet a minimum number of room bookings through the system, Meetingmax has no set minimums.

“With Meetingmax, we are only paying for the services that we use,” continued Francis. “Since we don’t pass on the fees to our member hotels, other products just didn’t justify the costs.”