Booking a block of hotel rooms used to be a fairly predictable exercise. A coordinator would estimate attendance, request a hold, sign a contract with standard attrition terms, and move on to other planning tasks. That predictability broke down during the pandemic, and the negotiation dynamics that replaced it have not fully reverted, even years later.
Group travel coordinators today are working with hotels that remember what happened when large blocks of contracted rooms went unused overnight in 2020. That memory shapes how attrition clauses, cancellation penalties, and force majeure language get written into contracts now, and it has forced planners to get more sophisticated about what they negotiate and when.
Attrition and Cancellation Terms Are Being Rewritten
An attrition clause determines how much of a contracted room block a group must fill before the hotel charges a penalty for the shortfall. Cancellation clauses cover what happens if the event is called off entirely. Both existed long before the pandemic, but the way they get negotiated has changed.
Vendelux’s guidance on event contract negotiation points to current strategies that include pushing hotels toward lower attrition thresholds, such as asking for a 75 percent fill requirement instead of the traditional 85 percent, along with structuring cancellation penalties on a sliding scale tied to how far in advance the cancellation occurs. That structure protects planners from the all-or-nothing exposure that caught many organizations off guard when events had to be scrapped with little notice.
Attorney Joshua Grimes, who advises event professionals on contract terms, has pointed out that current economic uncertainty and shifting government policy make it harder than ever to estimate room block needs accurately. Overestimating a block still carries real financial risk if attrition isn’t negotiated with enough flexibility, and that risk has only grown as attendance forecasting has become less reliable across the industry.
Beyond the wording of individual clauses, coordinators are also being more deliberate about when in the process to raise these issues. Attrition and cancellation terms carry the most negotiating power before a contract is signed. Once a coordinator has committed to a venue, the room to negotiate flexibility narrows considerably, which is part of why more experienced coordinators now treat these clauses as a first-round negotiation item rather than fine print to review at the end.
Coordinators managing housing for events with multiple contracted properties increasingly rely on a dedicated hotel booking platform to keep reservations, rates, and compliance details organized across every hotel in the block, rather than tracking each property’s terms separately in spreadsheets or email threads. That kind of centralized system becomes more valuable as the number of properties in a single event’s housing plan grows, since manual tracking gets error-prone once a coordinator is juggling attrition thresholds and cutoff dates that differ from hotel to hotel.
Direct Booking Behavior Has Proven More Durable Than Expected
While contract terms have shifted, the underlying booking channels have been more stable than many in the industry predicted. SiteMinder’s analysis of more than 135 million hotel reservations found that direct bookings held steady through 2025 despite conflicting predictions about how AI-driven search and booking tools would affect the channel. Revenue share for direct bookings stayed within 1.5 percentage points of the prior year in 95 percent of the markets analyzed, and direct bookings finished in the top three revenue sources in 90 percent of those markets.
Hotel websites generated an average of $516 per direct booking in 2025, ahead of wholesalers, global distribution systems, and online travel agencies, according to SiteMinder.
That stability matters for group coordinators because it suggests hotels still have strong incentive to work directly with organizations bringing group business, rather than pushing everything through third-party channels. Hotel websites also generated the highest average booking value of any channel tracked, at $516 per booking, ahead of wholesaler, global distribution system, and online travel agency channels. For hotels, group bookings arranged directly with an event or housing coordinator remain a meaningful part of that direct-channel revenue, which keeps the incentive to negotiate in good faith with group buyers intact.
What Recovering Group Travel Demand Means for Negotiating Power
The negotiating position of group coordinators has also shifted with overall demand. The U.S. Travel Association’s State of Group Travel Report found that RFP volume for group business reached 109 percent of 2019 levels, signaling that group demand has not just recovered but exceeded pre-pandemic activity in raw request volume. At the same time, the report noted that international attendance at group events declined across a majority of the top inbound markets tracked, even as domestic group activity held steady.
That combination, higher RFP volume paired with softer international attendance, creates uneven negotiating power depending on the market and event type. A domestic conference in a market with ample hotel inventory may still find hotels willing to negotiate aggressively on rate and terms. A group targeting a market with limited inventory or strong competing demand may find less room to push, regardless of how well-prepared the negotiation strategy is.
Group coordinators managing hotel room blocks that once involved a single property now frequently manage multiple properties for a single event, particularly for larger conferences, tournaments, or conventions that have outgrown any one hotel’s available inventory. When that happens, the operational complexity compounds quickly. Every additional hotel added to an event means another set of negotiated terms, another attrition clause to track, and another reconciliation process once the event concludes and actual room pickup is compared against what was contracted.
Practical Adjustments Coordinators Are Making
The shift in negotiation dynamics has produced a few consistent adjustments among experienced group travel coordinators.
None of these adjustments are radical departures from how sophisticated coordinators operated before 2020. What has changed is how consistently they get applied. Terms that used to be negotiated only by the largest, most experienced planning teams have become standard practice across a wider range of event types and sizes, driven by a shared industry memory of what happens when a contract does not account for disruption.
Looking Ahead
Hotel negotiation dynamics are unlikely to fully return to their pre-pandemic baseline. Hotels have adjusted their own risk models, and coordinators have adjusted their expectations in response. The result is a negotiation environment that rewards preparation more than it used to, with planners who arrive with clear pickup history, competing bids, and a defined negotiation strategy consistently securing better terms than those who do not.
For coordinators managing events that span multiple hotels, the negotiation itself is only part of the challenge. Once terms are set across several properties, keeping those terms straight, and making sure the numbers reconcile correctly after the event, has become its own discipline. That operational layer, sitting just behind the negotiation table, is where a growing share of group travel’s post-pandemic complexity now lives.
