Group travel booking: all your questions answered

Group bookings for flights can be tricky. Let’s see what tips our pro Giacomo has to offer. Keep reading for the interview.

When organising group bookings for flights, you need to contact the airlines and give them the number of travellers and your dates, and then wait for them to send back a custom quote. All the different airlines (like Southwest Airlines, Delta, American Airlines, United Airlines etc.) will have different fares and benefits for you depending on your specific booking requirements.Unlike a direct booking online, this process is manual and can be a little slow, as you’ll want to contact multiple airlines to get different pricing options. Travel agents would also have to do the same thing when dealing with group fares and your group's travel in general.

The airlines don’t necessarily offer special pricing. What they do offer is assurance that everyone in your group will get on the same flight (unless your group is hundreds of people of course). Let's say you're flying from Houston to Hawaii for your corporate retreat. They'll do their best to guarantee that everyone going is on the same flight, but that still might not be possible based on ticketing availability.

Getting a group deal from an airline is not always the best price. The airfare per flight on a group booking deal is often higher than if you log in to

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or the Expedia Group and see the individual flight cost. That’s because the airline knows how much they make on average for a ticket on that particular day. They can calculate what they expect to make for a round-trip. Just watch out for those blackout dates and do your best to avoid them!

Let’s say that you go to a popular travel booking site and you see that the cost for the flight you want is £50, but the airline knows that as the date gets closer they can sell it for £150, so the price they decide to give you at £80 per ticket because of your group size.This is why with a corporate group of 25 or less, it’s often cheaper to book the flights yourself. When I do this for our clients, I group them in batches of eight. Some carriers, especially low-cost carriers, will jack up the price right after someone has booked, so I wait a couple of hours before handling the next batch of eight travellers.

If you take the route of booking the flight manually, you have no guarantee that everyone in the group will get that flight. You might get to the last group of five or eight flyers, and there could be no availability. If you’ve planned enough in advance, this is very rare, but it is still a risk. So you have to be willing to risk that some travellers will need to take a different route or carrier if you want to get the best, lowest travel deals that day.

What about hotels? Let's see what we can learn from Giacomo.

In general, it’s much easier to negotiate prices for big groups with hotels than it is with airlines. They might experience less predictability with bookings and might be more likely to offer you a volume-based discount. Also, their rates don’t fluctuate as much, so it's easier for them to offer you a discount without worrying that they are sacrificing a higher-paying customer later.As with flights, you need to email the hotels that you are considering and tell them the number of rooms (and how many people per room) and the dates. You'll need to check their minimum stay requirements and look at the competitive fares they offer for these timeframes. Keep in mind that for business trips, it’s advised to not force employees to share a room whenever possible.Email anywhere from 5–15 different hotels to get quotes, and see if you can negotiate the price down.

While it’s hard to negotiate special discounts, for example, absolutely the easiest thing to negotiate for is extra benefits. For hotels, this would be room upgrades or free meals. And for flights, free luggage or priority check-ins are usually included or are easy to negotiate for.

Giacomo has even more tips for us.

First, we have to decide whether we want to get quotes from hotels and airlines and negotiate a group price, or if we want to handle the group booking ourselves online. We can review the options, but most of the time it’s easy for me to assume which is the best route depending on time constraints and the size of the group.

If you’re on a time crunch, it’s not worth it to negotiate back and forth with the airline for a better price.And as time goes on, the average ticket cost will rise, so they will only want to charge you more. They can sometimes take 24–48 hours to get back to you, so you’re not in a good position to negotiate for trips that are coming up soon.Knowing what to negotiate depends on the company. I take a different approach for each carrier and hotel depending on the situation.

We recently planned for 400 people to come to Barcelona for the

Netcentric Summit 2018

. They were from 12 different locations. We sent out a

Typeform

asking everyone where they are coming from and how long they will be staying. Then we sorted these responses and grouped people together based on location and dates. Once we did that, we based our approach on what was right for each individual group.

It can take anywhere from three days to three months. Of course, three months is on the extreme end, things like conferences and big events with multiple attendees and speakers. One week is more typical!

The best thing you can do is to get all of the information upfront. Try to proactively ask questions. So don’t just stop at knowing that you need a hotel in London or San Francisco, for example. Find out exactly what neighbourhood and what style of hotel is preferred, like modern or boutique.I also try to get pre-approved for booking, especially with trips that are coming up soon. Let’s say there is a group trip of 16 people and the trip is six weeks away.I will tell the client about why the group booking rates for the airline will be more expensive, and that my approach is to handle the booking manually.Then I’ll let them know that as long as the second batch of eight isn’t a difference of more than 50 pounds, I will book it myself.Of course, that’s just an example, but the point is that I try proactively to minimise the back-and-forth if time is an issue. There’s a balance between saving the client money and saving them time. If I take too long to book, it can waste money. So, I always make sure to get as much information as I can and get approval to book beforehand if that’s needed. But for most trips, I’m able to show them the options and let them decide before the final booking.

If you’re booking something for a company event, you can use the same strategy: try to get approval and information from the right people upfront if you can.

One time, we had booked 40 rooms for a group event in Lisbon. The colleagues were sharing rooms, and there were two beds in each room.We got a call that the bathroom walls were made of glass, so you would be able to see each other when using the bathroom or the shower. We talked with the hotel directly and they put up something to cover it. They had to cover all the glass walls in 40 rooms!

With that recent summit in Barcelona, we organised for buses to pick up everyone from the airport. That week it was snowing all over Europe, and all the flights were delayed. The plans for the pickup buses were completely ruined.We organised for hosts to go and greet them at the airport and help them. On the spot, the hosts had to reorganise all of the bus groups since everyone had arrived at different times than expected. It was crazy, but we worked it out!

If companies want help with group bookings, we can handle the entire process. We decide the best approach and negotiate the rate or we will manually book the trip.