What is a Hotel Reader Board Service?

What others call Field Research, the Hospitality industry calls a Reader Board Service

How hotels find out what their competitors are doing

For years, hoteliers working in group/convention sales have needed to know what is going on in their competition’s group meeting space. Who are the organizations holding events in the property across the street? What about at the hotel across town? How big are the events? Are they small board meetings or large conventions with hundreds of attendees spending multiple nights in the hotel? These are just a few of the numerous questions group sales managers and directors of sales in hotels have needed answered.

Fortunately, when compared to field research in other sectors, the hospitality industry makes determining this information very easy. Virtually every hotel with group meeting space utilizes what is referred to as a reader board. A reader board can be many different things: an electronic sign, a flat screen television, a piece of paper on a podium under a piece of glass. But they all do the same thing. They list the events occurring in the hotel. Typically they will have the organization’s name, the event name, and meeting room and time details.

For many years hotel sales managers would take turns visiting their competitors. Some hotels would have people stop on their way into work. Some would send an administrative assistant out each day. Others would do it periodically based on the work load of the sales team. But recording reader board data was a common task of sales managers industry-wide.

Hotel reader board services appear to free up sales managers

Starting in the mid to late 1980’s, the first hotel reader board services began to appear. Typically started by ex-hoteliers, these services would charge hotels a fee to record reader board data for them. Usually the owner of the business would visit a set number of hotels, write down the reader board data on a notepad, then go home and type it into spreadsheets. In the beginning this information was then faxed to the hotels, typically some weeks after the events had occurred.

By 2004, when the Knowland Group was founded, there were between fifteen and twenty reader board services operating across the United States and Canada. One was quite large, operating in multiple metropolitan areas (see How We Got Started) with hundreds of hotels as clients. Two or three operated in a smaller set of cities and the vast majority of the rest were local operations, typically run from someone’s home office.

Why hotel sales teams care: how reader board services are used

Reader board services are a very well known hospitality industry business practice. They serve two main purposes. First, they allow hotel managers and directors to compare the success of their group sales activity to their competition. It’s much easier to benchmark how well a sales team is doing at generating new business if one can see the success of other similar hotels. Second, and more significantly, reader board services serve as a great lead generation service. The logic being that if a group has held an event in a direct competitor, they probably have future needs, and hotels would want a chance to compete for that business.

This second component of a reader board service, the concept of it as an amazing lead generation service, is the starting point from which all of our business development solutions have flown. Please see our products section for more detail.