“There’s no reason anyone should book outside the block, and if you do, we cannot be responsible. When we see 30 rooms held with no name, immediately there’s a red flag.
Yes, sometimes organizations do that, as they need the rooms, but a red flag goes up nonetheless,†Dominguez added.
Meeting, incentive, convention and exhibition business is under attack by pirates.
To be more specific, event room blocks are increasingly feeling the effects of room block piracy, in which third parties—sometimes thieves out to steal credit card information and sometimes more legitimate sources—effectively funnel attendees away from official host hotels.
The practice results in host hotels having no record of these attendees’ reservations; attendees themselves thinking they made the booking through a legitimate source, and meeting and event planners often having to pay attrition fees for not fulfilling room-block agreements with host hotels.
Suffering are the attendee, who loses money to the pirate; the hotel, which might have replaced “non-bookings†with less-valuable business, and the event planner and event itself, which run the risk of ruined reputations.
For more:Â http://bit.ly/18uSCWq
