The conversation your RFP form is having without you.

The Moment

There is a version of making something easy that is actually making it hard.

A form that asks for every detail before a planner has decided whether they are interested. A response that arrives three days after the inquiry, when the planner has already moved on. A website that looks polished and says nothing a planner actually needs to know. From the planner's side, all of it sends a signal before the first phone call, and not a good one.

Friction usually has an address. It lives in specific places and responds to specific fixes. Three things worth trying this week:

1. 1 Pull up your property's event inquiry page and time how long it takes to complete the contact form. If it takes more than four minutes, the form is the problem.
2. 2 Ask the last three planners who booked with you how they found the inquiry process. No survey needed. Just ask. What you hear will be more honest than anything in a post-event report.
3. 3 Write one paragraph that answers the question planners never ask but always want answered: "What is it actually like to run an event at this property?" Put it somewhere a first-time visitor can find it in thirty seconds.

If any of these surface something worth sharing, hit reply. Curious what you find.

Party Trends

Something is shifting in how event rooms look.

The spare, minimal aesthetic that dominated event design for the better part of a decade, clean lines, neutral palettes, simple centerpieces, is giving way to something richer. Layered. Unapologetically full.

Lewis Miller Design's Spring Ball at The Plaza Hotel this spring had it all: warm amber lighting, dramatic tiered overhead florals, tablescapes that filled the visual field completely. The Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix activated across 50 clubs, lounges, and outdoor spaces with production that treated the entire city as one large set. The Kentucky Derby kept expanding its experiential footprint year over year, adding partners and sensory layers with each edition.

The through-line is volume. More texture. More layers. More visual information per square foot.

After years of minimalism, the rooms people remember are the rooms where it looked like something was at stake. If your standard event setup is still clean and neutral, your clients may be looking at their mood boards and wondering if they arrived at the wrong property.

What does your event space look like when it's fully dressed?

Behind the Curtain

Hotels have a friction problem. Not the kind that gets fixed with a renovation budget.

It lives inside the RFP form that asks for everything before a planner has decided they are interested. Inside the response that arrives three days after the inquiry. Inside the website that looks polished but tells a planner nothing useful about what it is actually like to run an event there.

Susan Tucker and Cory Falter of The Lure Agency lay this out in detail in a recent HospitalityNet piece, alongside Don Barnett, Director of Sales and Marketing at LondonHouse Chicago. Their argument is practical and specific: friction in the booking process is not neutral. It plants doubt about execution before the event has even been quoted. Planners talk. One difficult experience with a property gets shared with colleagues as a warning, and the hotel loses business it never knew it was competing for.

The fix they outline is not expensive. A short contact form alongside the full RFP, so planners can start a conversation without having to finish it in one sitting. A real FAQ built for the person evaluating the property, not for the hotel's internal team. Response protocols that treat a group inquiry like the warm lead it actually is.

Most of the friction in a hotel's sales process was designed by the hotel. Which means it belongs to the hotel to remove.

The Party Report