The Issues Surrounding ROCH: Rooms Outside Contracted Hotel By Bruce Harris, President, Conferon Global Services Early in April, Conferon led three different audio conferences to address the issue of Rooms Outside the Contracted Hotels (ROCH). This is best known to many association meeting planners as the problem created when attendees go on the Internet and select different hotels than those the association contracted. Attendees make this switch for primarily one reason—lower rates. Who can really blame them? The economy is poor and not in any hurry to recover, and leaders are putting pressure on everyone to lower expenses. Booking rooms outside the contracted hotels has cost the majority of associations tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in attrition liability. In 2002 alone, one of every five citywides had liability. Boards of Directors are putting pressure on association executives to do “whatever possible” to stop the bleeding. We’ve seen many different approaches to the problem. Some approaches actually reflect a mindset that “things won’t change” and so some associations are budgeting large sums of attrition payment money in their meeting budgets. Unfortunately, this will only guarantee that their meeting revenues will forever be eaten away because they were unable to incent their members to stay at the contracted hotels. This is no solution. Some planners are refusing to allow attrition clauses into their contracts. Some hotels are currently desperate enough to agree to this demand. For both parties, this situation is very short-lived. Hotel owners are becoming increasingly vocal about how hotel management companies are permitting their rooms to be contracted and held for long periods with absolutely no assurance that the hotel will get any revenue. Imagine if a trade show for an association was run the same way. What if the trade show floor space was limited to only 200 booths and all 200 booths were sold, then 3 days before the show 35 percent of the exhibitors cancelled and got all their money back? It would be too late to resell the booths and the association would still have to pay the full rent, carpet, and pipe and drape price. Wouldn’t that just kill the association’s chance to make a profit? Well, that’s what could happen to hotels if they did not have some attrition protection. Here are the facts: Meeting hotels cannot stay in business if they have to stop selling their guest rooms in the hope that a group will show up and buy its rooms. Attrition, while it may be an optional clause in some hotel contracts today, will be a certainty when the economy gets better. We as an industry need to create solutions where our attendees are encouraged to stay at the hotels their associations contract. There will be resistance by some who do not want to deal with change or who believe attrition will never impact their association. There are those who today have chosen to incent their members, and their stories of incredible success will be flooding the media in the coming months. We will share those stories.