Glossary of Terms

In general, an association is a group of persons banded together for a specific purpose. If an unincorporated association’s purpose is charitable, educational, and/or scientific in nature, it can qualify as a Section 501(c)(3) organization (also called a public charity). Contributions to Section 501(c)(3) are tax deductible. Other names for associations include society, college (ex: College of American Pathologists), and academy (ex: American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons), among others.
Knowland tools allow a user to further breakdown the association market into the subsets of national, regional, state, local, and minority.

Comp set is short for competitive set. Hotels choose other hotels that they feel they most closely compete with to define their comp set. Hotels benchmark their performance off of the aggregate of their performance, so it drives their revenue/available room index. A hotel’s understanding of their market as a whole is one of the chief results and goals of defining and following a comp set.
Knowland allows hotels to see what group business drives the business of the comp set properties they select. In doing so, they can then set sales strategies and action steps to shift market share.

Corporate, or corporate group, is the market segment used to categorize any for-profit company. There are numerous subsets under the corporate market such as technology, banking, finance, pharmaceutical, etc.
Knowland products allow users assigned to the corporate group market to filter results in order to narrow down those results within the corporate market for targeted sales solicitation.

The government market segment is one of the main market segments a hotel chooses to pursue, although it tends to be highly specialized and complex in the way in which planners within the segment book meetings. Generally, planners of government meetings seek the per diem rate and sometimes source their meetings thru the GSA, which can add layers of complexity to the booking process.
With Knowland products and tools, users can narrow down results within a search for government meetings into subset of federal, state, and local so their sales efforts can exactly mirror their own sales deployment.

Most hotels divide organizations that hold groups and meetings into one of several categories of business called market segments. Sales managers at hotels are generally assigned to one or more of these market segments as a focus for their sales activities. From the segment to which they are assigned, they cultivate and develop group opportunities for their hotel.
The main market segments* are:

• Corporate
• Association
• SMERF
• Government

Each one of these segments has subsets (further defined within this glossary) that sales managers can additionally apply for more granular focus.
Within Knowland products and tools, users have the option of using these market segments (and subsets) as filters to edit down the results of a search, therefore making it much easier for them to target groups that directly align with their assigned segment.
 
*Tour and Travel is sometimes included as a main segment.

At Knowland, past events refers to the meetings and group events that an organization has held in the past. Under an organization’s “Past Events” tab in the Knowland tool, a user can see the months in which meetings were held, see the types of hotels that have been booked previously, the arrival/departure pattern of a group, and the amount of meeting space the group has utilized for previous meetings. This type of insight into a group’s booking patterns can allow a user to formulate deeper and more effective strategies about what groups to pursue and ways in which they might improve proactive sales tactics.

A readerboard is the display board found in the meeting space area of a hotel that lists the meetings at the hotel happening that day, the times of the sessions, and the name of the meeting room being used.
The information on a hotel readerboard forms the basis for Knowland’s extensive database of more than a half-million groups.

An acronym, this market segment consists of groups and meetings that fall into the categories of Social, Military, Educational, Religious, and Fraternal.
Knowland breaks down these subsets into individual filters that users can utilize to narrow down a broad SMERF search.

An SMMP is a Strategic Meeting Management Program. Found mostly in corporate groups, an SMMP is a complex procurement-driven set of rules and regulations that govern and guide a company’s meeting planning efforts. The goal of an SMMP is to track meeting spend so that it can be analyzed and leveraged to create savings within the corporation, resulting in cost savings and risk mitigation.
With Knowland tools, hotels can get extensive detail on a company’s SMMP requirements so they can have deeper understanding of the rules in which they need to operate. Once these rules are understood, a hotel can try and become part of a company’s meetings program by becoming an approved hotel and book more group business from that company.

Knowland’s database divides each of the major market segments (Corporate, Association, SMERF, and Government) into subsets. A subset is the breakdown of a main market segment into the subcategories of group classification that make up that main segment. This is done so that sales managers who are assigned to a very specific market subset within a main market can filter search results and find the groups that match the way in which they are deployed.

A third-party planner is a meeting planner who books meetings and groups on behalf of an organization. He or she is compensated by a commission (usually 10 percent) paid by the hotel that is confirmed to be the host of the meeting booked.
Third-party planners can be independent contractors or work for a meeting planning organization that books meetings for all types of organizations. They usually have no restrictions on the location or the brand of hotel that can be booked, as long as they are paid their commission.
Knowland products and tools support hoteliers by identifying who the end-user meeting planner contact is for an organization, plus revealing information on any third-party planners who are associated with booking meetings for an organization.
Any third-party planner listed as a contact for a group is identified as a third party so the user can anticipate the need that will exist to offer commission.