In the fast-paced world of fintech, efficiency and cost savings are paramount. Our client, a Series B fintech company, needed to organize a quarterly offsite for three teams - a total of 40 guests - over four nights in October 2024. The goal was to find high quality accommodation within walking distance of their New York office at the best rate possible.
Without Workgrounds, this would involve hours of research, emailing and calling hotels, personally negotiating prices, and dealing with contract negotiations. With Workgrounds, this company streamlined the entire process, getting all 3 bookings done within a speedy 72 hours. Plus, they paid corporate group rates that can traditionally only be accessed by negotiating with hotels via a lengthy and opaque RFP process.
- Purpose of trip: Quarterly offsites
- Teams: 3
- Guests: 40 (some local, some flying in)
- Company setup: Fully remote
- Employees: 100 - 1000
- Location: US-based
- Requirements: Events in their office + activities as a team.
- Roles: Managed by People team, in collaboration with 3x team leads. (Compliance, Operations & Privacy).
Challenge
The company’s people team supports logistics for team trips. Their goals were to:
- Book rooms for 40 guests over 4 nights, ideally in one hotel
- Stay within a certain area close to their office
- Find 3+ star hotel experiences
- Get consensus from team leads on the final choice of stay
- Get the best price possible
They also wanted to find out if hotels had workspaces available and what the rates would be, in case the office was full on a given day.
They received offers from all 5 hotels within 48 hours, with an average discount of 13% off for booking as a group.
Solution & results
Using the Workgrounds product they:
- Easily uploaded the entire guest list and built a trip in minutes.
- Selected 5 relevant hotels and instantly requested group availability and rates for their dates.
- Received offers from all 5 hotels within 48 hours.
- Compared offers and selected based on quality, cost, and location.
- Shared options with team leads for final decision-making.
- Made 3 hotel bookings within 24 hours based on the offers.
- Invited all guests, who could then see their confirmed rooms and the plan for the whole trip.
The booking for 40 guests was finalized within three days, requiring under an hour of effort in the product.
What they didn’t have to do
- Research to find contacts for group bookings at each hotel.
- Handle individual email offers from 5 hotels; all offers were in one place and easy to find for everyone added to the trip.
- Chase hotels or negotiate rates.
- Deal with contract execution and vendor management for hotel bookings - all hotels were included in the already-signed Workgrounds contract..
- Put together individual RFP/ group booking requests for each hotel, or go back and forth providing more information. Our simple RFP form made sure they included everything the hotel would need.
They went with the best offer and saved 28% on retail rates, saving them $17,995.
Easy management of changes
Did you know that currently, most of the time when you directly book a hotel for a group, there’s no online interface to make simple changes like adding or removing a room or swapping out a guest? Using Workgrounds solves that problem - any changes to the booking this client needed to make were possible to do using the platform.
That includes:
- Assign guests to rooms.
- Switch people around, remove or replace guest names as needed.
- Add or drop rooms, including handling payments and refunds.
- View contract terms, including cancellation and refund details.
- Automatically share any updated trip details to guests.
Some guests booked flights via Workgrounds
Not all guests needed flights to New York. Those who did need flights were invited to book via Workgrounds. The organizers could see who had booked flights and who hadn’t, the cost of each journey, and where and when each person would be arriving and leaving from.
Conclusion
Using Workgrounds, this company managed the logistics of their quarterly 40-person offsite in record time and saved $17,995 - a 28% discount compared to booking online using a typical retail hotel booking site.
As compared to doing this process manually by contacting each hotel individually, they also reduced the planning time from 8+ hours to just 1 hour.
Receiving group rate offers from hotels so quickly meant they were able to streamline the decision-making process, even with multiple teams and decision-makers involved.
Workgrounds transformed the cumbersome and time-consuming task of booking accommodation for a corporate group into a simple, efficient, and cost-effective process. Getting the logistics out of the way allowed the team to focus on the more important things: making sure their event was effective, valuable and fun!
To see if your company can benefit from Workgrounds in a similar way, book a short demo call with our CEO here.
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