What is Passkey?
 

For my last two meetings (one small and one medium sized, USA and Europe), I was instructed to make a hotel room reservation at the conference rate for the room block through a new outfit called Passkey. When I google it, they seem to be a small business that specializes in conference bookings and room blocks. It's not clear whether they provide services such as site selection or rate negotiations.

For my meetings, when I click on the provided link for the room block, it looks like I'm being taken to a special area of the hotel's own reservation website, Hyatt and Marriott in my examples. One sees the brand logos, colors, way of presenting room types and rates, etc. However, the URL starts with resweb.passkey.com. This makes me nervous.

However, although this isn't disclosed, when I call either my private line agent at Hyatt or the Marriott Platinum Premier line, they say that these would not be considered bookings through their website and would not earn points, night/stay credits, or elite benefits. As I workaround, I asked whether they could get me a reservation in the room block or at our special rate, but the answers were negative. (For these meetings in the past, either I was told to book directly with the hotel and ask for our room block or I was able to call my normal elite line for the reservation. Also in the past, sometimes there was a link that did seem to go directly into the hotel/chain website, not a third party website.) While the answers vary, Hyatt and Marriott agents have described Passkey as a consolidator or discounter, but we're apparently getting pretty normal conference rates that have always earned benefits in the past. (These are not meetings that do master bills.) The deposit and cancel terms for these reservations aren't very attractive either, given that we're not getting deeply discounted rates.

Is this the end of receiving frequent guest hotel benefits for meetings and conferences?

Does anyone have experience with Passkey?

I am also actually wondering about this issue. The rates look good but I am confused as to all how this works.

Looks like a post on this thread indicates that at least for Marriott it counts for points and benefits:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marri...nt-points.html

This day had to come - you can't expect all perks of regular stay to go forever, while paying deeply discounted conference/corporate rate.

Except that rooms in conference/trade show blocks often aren't that deeply discounted.

No experience with it here, but having organized meetings/conferences/trade shows in the past, I know that reconciling attendees vs. the room block is a regular headache. Half the time it seems as if attendees call the hotel's central reservation number and they have no knowledge of the room block/conference discount, etc. Since it's often critical to organizers to ensure that the room block gets filled, I'm not surprised that they're taking more aggressive steps to ensure that the attendees are getting put in their room block.

I am aware of some organizations that negotiate a deal with the hotel whereby they get the meeting rooms for free, and the hotel rolls the fee into the rate they charge for the blocked sleeping rooms. Hence, in some cases I have been able to get a better rate through the hotel web site or an OLTA as a regular reservation, bypassing the room block for the convention.

In the case here, it sounds like Passkey is paying a kickback to the convention sponsor for exclusive rights to the room block.