In 1926, a Tulsa businessman by the name of Cyrus Avery championed to make “The Main Street of America” a national highway – making Tulsa, Oklahoma the birthplace of Route 66.
Today, as part of its effort to position Tulsa as a leading event destination and to attract more meeting planners and event attendees to experience the historic wonder of Tulsa’s Route 66, VisitTulsa has decided to deploy Passkey’s GroupMAX ME event booking technology, in essence creating a new high-tech highway to streamline the complex task of managing hotel bookings for its events.
The new technology complements Tulsa’s newly renovated Convention Center, which now features 300,000-plus square feet of meeting, exhibition and pre-function space, and serves as an essential tool to attract meetings and events to the region.
“VisitTulsa is excited to partner with Passkey in rolling out GroupMAX ME to the Tulsa hospitality community,” said Ray Hoyt, senior vice president of VisitTulsa. “This new business solution will allow our staff to provide improved service to existing clients, sell Tulsa to larger events and deliver a higher quality of service to groups that need the housing services that GroupMAX ME provides.”
The GroupMAX ME system will provide VisitTulsa the ability to help its meeting planners execute seamless housing programs that offer memorable experiences for event guests while delivering measurable business results for the city and its hotel and business community.
Specifically, GroupMAX ME provides VisitTulsa’s planners the ability to maintain control over their hotel room blocks with a highly intuitive environment to monitor critical event data from a single location. Using live event dashboards, planners can track event metrics and analytics in real-time, helping them maximize the performance of their contracted hotel blocks while minimizing the financial risks associated with attrition clauses and outside-the-block bookings.
At the same time, VisitTulsa can use GroupMAX ME’s hotel block management toolset to efficiently handle the specific needs of multiple exhibitors, attendee types and sports teams, helping them attract and serve the diverse needs of a wide range of groups. From receiving sub-block requests online and allocating inventory, to enabling groups to book their own hotel reservations and manage their own sub-blocks, GroupMAX ME allows meeting planners to optimize their large-scale room blocks with a user-friendly, automated process.
