Isn’t it great when things turn out as advertised? That’s the way it was with the CAHA HR Committee meeting on February 5 at The Westin. Rescheduled because of the threat of bad weather in January, the purpose of the meeting was to go over all of the bookings in Charlotte for calendar 2010 to help in employee planning and scheduling. CAHA executive director went over the TAP Report (trend analysis versus projection), which consisted of a monthly bar chart of confirmed and tentative meetings we might host.

Then Sid led the group through a review of total bookings for each month of the year, highlighting the days when bookings were heavy and when they were light. This review gave a day-by-day review, by event name and the projected number of room nights for each. In both cases, the daily review and the TAP report review show meetings (tentative and confirmed) through Visit Charlotte.

Each hotel has to take these “city” events and match them up with their internal bookings to get a better picture of employee needs. For example, one hotel might be one of the participating properties in a booking on the daily citywide sheet from Visit Charlotte and know full well what’s coming. Another hotel might not know anything about this citywide booking and see in their own bookings that they have availability and they should expect spillover or “compression” because the larger meeting was being held in town. That means the hotel might need more staff than what they’re internal bookings are telling them.

The HR directors are constantly checking with their own internal sales staff to see what’s on the books and make a staffing plan. But their internal sales staff may not know, or inform them, about larger citywide meetings that the hotel is not directly involved with. The directors were encouraged to ask their sales staff for continuous data like this for the whole city, in addition to just their internal bookings.