Case Studies

Prestige Accommodations' experience saves The Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (HFES) $40,000 in attrition charges

Client: A not-for-profit scientific organization. Attendance at their annual meeting approximates 1400-1500 persons with the profit from the meetings helping to sustain the organization throughout the following year.

Challenge: In an unusual year, due to various circumstances, the attendance at the annual meeting was significantly lower than normal. As such, they not only lost money on the event, they also were responsible for attrition charges at the hotel amounting to over $50,000.

Solution: Prestige Accommodations entered into negotiations on the client's behalf with the hotel. Utilizing its understanding of the processes in these situations as well as the amount of business represented by Prestige Accommodations, the hotel lowered the damages due them by HFES to approximately $10,000.

Result: HFES was able to pay the damages from association funds and to survive the following year.

Serving as a powerful client advocate throughout contract negotiations for the American Society of Military Comptrollers (ASMC) pays dividends:

Client: ASMC is a not-for-profit military organization. Attendance at their annual meeting runs between 4000 and 4500 persons with the profits from the meetings used to not only operate the organization for the following year, but to provide money for education and studies to improve members' abilities.

Challenge: The group had been contracted with a number of hotels and the convention center in Honolulu for their annual meeting. However, the Department of Defense came down with a ruling that no meetings could be held OCONUS (outside the continental United States). The penalties associated with breaking the existing contractual obligations were enormous.

Solution: During the negotiating process, Prestige Accommodations insisted on wording in the contract that would allow the group to be released from its obligations to the hotels and convention center if any governmental regulation was formulated that mandated the release.

Result: While not all hotels initially agreed with our assessment that the DOD ruling met that criteria, Prestige Accommodations was ultimately able to convince them that was indeed the case and ASMC was released from all obligations in Hawaii without penalty of any sort. The foresight of Prestige Accommodations to ask for the inclusion of such a clause as well as the subsequent negotiation on behalf of our client amounted to a savings of several hundred thousand dollars.

Century-21 Real Estate Company (C-21) eliminates waste and saves a bundle with Prestige Accommodations:

Client: A major real estate company, owned by Realogy Corporation of Parsippany, New Jersey. Their annual meeting traditionally had 4000 attendees.

Challenge: Each year C-21 hosted a lunch for award winners, high level sales persons, their spouses and guests. They were never able to correctly estimate the number of attendees as some winners never attended and others showed up who claimed they were entitled to the lunch. Planning on 700 persons often left a large number of lunches unused, but paid for.

Solution: Prestige Accommodations devised a voucher system which allowed the winners to each receive a coupon valued at a specific dollar amount which could be used in the hotel food outlets. The actual number of coupons would be charged to the master account unless each attendee spent LESS than the value of the coupon, in which case the hotel had to charge the lower amount. Coupons were returned to us for verification of charges.

Result: Net savings to C-21 of approximately $100,000 each year