Elite Meetings International Introduces SpeedRFP

With support from Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and APEX, both of which are integrating it on their meetings industry Web sites, meetings technology supplier Elite Meetings International introduced at the Motivation Show this week SpeedRFP, a new product for creating, submitting and tracking RFPs online.

Expected to be available industry-wide in early 2010, SpeedRFP–which, according to Elite Meetings International, is the “only online Request for Proposal tool that is completely portable”–allows meeting planners to take meeting, event and incentive RFPs anywhere on the Internet and submit them on any SpeedRFP-enabled Web site, or via a dedicated site at SpeedRFP.com.

“We are delighted to introduce SpeedRFP,” Elite Meetings International CEO Kelly Foy said in a statement. “We believe we have created an innovative new product that will help both meeting professionals and hotel sales professionals conduct business faster and with greater ease and cost-efficiency.”

Completely free and completely in line with APEX standards, SpeedRFP allows meeting professionals to save time by electronically entering standard RFP information just once for all hotels and venues, rather than completing a new RFP for each of their targets. It allows venues, meanwhile, to seamlessly integrate with their own branded Web sites and access an entire network of SpeedRFP planners.

“The largest hotel chains receive only 20-30 percent of their RFPs through online forms,” Foy said. “That means both planners and hotels continue to deal with unnecessary inconvenience, administrative cost and inefficiencies. SpeedRFP was developed to bring as many of these professionals as possible into a community of users that benefit from quicker, easier and more cost-effective transactions.”

— Nielsen Business Media