How Hotel RFPs Have Changed Since 2023: What Event Planners Should Expect

Anyone who negotiated a hotel contract in 2022 remembers the whiplash. Rates spiked, availability tightened, and hotels held nearly all the negotiating power in every conversation. Three years later, the RFP process looks meaningfully different, and event planners who assume the old playbook still applies are likely leaving money and flexibility on the table.

The shift has not been dramatic in any single year. It has been a gradual rebalancing, driven by cooling rate growth, more assertive buyers, and a group demand environment that has proven far more resilient than many in the industry expected. Understanding what actually changed, rather than relying on outdated assumptions, matters for anyone sourcing hotel rooms for an event today, whether that event is a single-property meeting or a multi-hotel program spanning dozens of properties across a full event season.

Rate Growth Has Slowed Considerably Since the 2022 Spike

The most visible shift shows up in the numbers themselves. According to reporting from Business Travel Executive, global average daily rate rose a striking 23 percent in 2022 as the industry recovered from pandemic-era demand collapse. That growth slowed to 5.5 percent in 2023, and industry sources quoted in the same reporting expected an increase of roughly 3.5 percent for 2024, a pace much closer to general inflation than the shock increases planners had grown used to negotiating around.

Global average daily rate growth cooled from 23 percent in 2022 to 5.5 percent in 2023, with industry sources projecting roughly 3.5 percent growth for 2024.

That deceleration changed the tone of negotiations. Executives quoted in the reporting described the most recent RFP season as feeling like “a return to normalcy” after several years of volatility. Buyers, emboldened by the calmer environment, took a more active role in pushing back on rate proposals. Some travel management companies reported negotiating rate reductions rather than accepting increases, a dynamic that would have been almost unthinkable during the peak of the 2022 rate surge.

Group Demand Has Not Slowed Down, Even as Rates Cooled

The cooling of rate growth did not come from weaker demand. If anything, group travel has proven more durable than many expected. The U.S. Travel Association’s State of Group Travel Report found that RFP volume for group business reached 109 percent of 2019 levels, meaning organizations are submitting group hotel requests at a higher rate than they were before the pandemic ever happened.

Convention-specific data tells a similar story. Analysts at Lodging Analytics Research and Consulting, speaking at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit and reported by CoStar, noted that the 30 largest convention centers they track across the country were pacing five percent ahead of the prior year, which the analysts described as a positive signal for group demand at hotels heading into the year. That combination, cooling rates paired with strong underlying demand, is unusual, and it has reshaped what planners can realistically expect to negotiate.

What This Means for the Modern RFP Process

For event planners managing a hotel rfp process today, the practical implications of these shifts are worth understanding before entering a negotiation.

Rate expectations should be calibrated to a much smaller annual increase than what planners may remember from 2022 or even 2023. Asking a hotel to justify a double-digit rate increase carries far more weight in an environment where global ADR growth has settled closer to three to four percent than it did when 23 percent increases were treated as the new normal.

At the same time, planners should not assume that cooling rates translate into abundant, easy-to-book inventory. Strong convention center pacing and RFP volume exceeding pre-pandemic levels mean hotels in in-demand markets and dates still hold real negotiating power, particularly for events competing for space during peak seasons or in cities with limited new hotel supply. The negotiating dynamic has become more balanced, not one-sided in favor of buyers.

Static Versus Dynamic Rates Remains a Live Debate

One structural shift worth watching closely is the ongoing tension between static and dynamic pricing models. Hotels generally prefer dynamic rates, which let them raise prices during periods of high demand, while buyers tend to favor static rates for the predictability they offer when building an event budget. Reporting on the 2024 RFP season found that a meaningful share of negotiations swung back toward fixed rates, with hotel executives noting that many long-standing holdouts on dynamic pricing were beginning to test the approach in limited markets.

That back-and-forth is unlikely to resolve cleanly in either direction soon. Planners negotiating hotel contracts should expect to keep having this conversation explicitly rather than assuming either model is now the industry default, since the answer still depends heavily on the specific market, the hotel brand, and how much room-night volume a given event can credibly deliver. A planner sourcing rooms in a market with strong convention pacing may find hotels far more insistent on dynamic pricing than one sourcing in a secondary market with softer demand, which means the right approach to this question can shift meaningfully from one RFP to the next, even within the same organization’s annual sourcing calendar.

Practical Adjustments for Planners Entering the RFP Process Now

Given these shifts, a few adjustments are worth building into any current hotel sourcing strategy.

• Benchmark proposed rate increases against the roughly three to four percent pace that has become typical since 2023, rather than the double-digit increases common in 2022
• Come to the table with historical pickup data and be prepared to push back on proposals that do not reflect the calmer rate environment
• Treat static versus dynamic pricing as an open negotiation point rather than assuming one model applies universally
• Recognize that strong convention and group demand in specific markets still gives hotels real negotiating power, even as overall rate growth has slowed
• Start the sourcing conversation earlier in competitive markets, since RFP volume exceeding pre-pandemic levels means popular dates can still fill quickly

None of these adjustments guarantee a better outcome on their own, but they reflect where the negotiating environment actually stands today rather than where it stood during the volatility of 2022 and early 2023.

Looking Ahead

The hotel RFP process has settled into a steadier rhythm since the extremes of 2022, but steadier does not mean simple. Planners who walk into negotiations expecting either a return to pre-pandemic buyer-friendly conditions or a continuation of pandemic-era rate shocks are working from an outdated picture. The reality sits somewhere in between: calmer rate growth, genuinely resilient group demand, and a negotiating dynamic that rewards planners who show up with current data rather than assumptions carried over from a few years ago.

That data-driven posture matters more with each passing RFP cycle. Hotels have grown accustomed to buyers pushing back on proposed increases, and sales teams increasingly expect planners to arrive with specific benchmarks rather than a general sense that rates “feel too high.” A planner who can point to the roughly three to four percent rate growth pattern documented since 2023, alongside concrete pickup history from prior events, is simply better positioned than one relying on outdated expectations from either the pandemic recovery years or the pre-pandemic era. The RFP process rewards preparation now more than it has in years, precisely because both sides of the table have more current data available than at almost any point in the recent past.