My company has asked me to book our project personnel into one of the major hotels overseas. This will involve 20+ rooms for at least 6 months continuous, or over 3,600 room nights. These are not "Convention" hotels, so this is a large number of room nights for them.

Since this is a big contract, we want to keep our per night room costs to a minimum and get maximum benefits at same time.

We will need extras such as complimentary breakfast, health club, internet, daily transportation to and from airport, etc. These do not seem to be a problem for the hotel, although they seem to want to jack up the rate to compensate themselves. Still, for ease of bookkeeping, etc., we want to negotiate a package of services covered by a nightly room charge, not a la carte where we have to pay for some separately.

Can you help with these questions:

1. Should we try to negotiate directly with Hotel, or instead with the National Group Desk? Am I right that the NGD would charge a commission to the hotel, so contacting Hotel directly will likely result in lower rate?

2. With so many room nights, is there a rule of thumb as to how many rooms or nights we can get free for a given number of rooms / nights? Perhaps 1 free night for every X Room Nights.

3. What other amenities should we expect or ask for?

4. How many Reward Points can the organizers get? Is it feasible to get regular points for all the rooms for all the nights? We would like to divert these to our company rather than the occupants of the rooms. Or does issuing RPs cost the Hotel money which they don't want to spend in view of giving us rock-bottom rate? How can we maximize the points coming to the organizing company? If we can't capture all the RPs, can we capture some and the rest go to the occupants of the rooms?

5. If regular points for all the rooms for all the nights is not feasible in your opinion, how much of a block of points would be expected? Hopefully, more than the 50,000 maximum normally offered by NGD.

6. Do you think we could negotiate with NGD or perhaps Hotel directly to give one or more of our Executives one year, multi year, or maybe lifetime Diamond (or unpublished higher than Diamond) status?

7. Any other items you might mention you think we could obtain.

Many thanks for your input.


Full disclosure--we also posted this on other Hotel forums since there does not seem to be a place to post this globally. Also, since this is a specialized area, we want to be visible to experts frequenting the other forums and not necessarily this one.