Stop Copy-Pasting Into ChatGPT: How to Actually Use AI to Write a Better Event RFP

Open ChatGPT in one tab. Open a blank RFP template in another. Toggle back and forth for twenty minutes, tweaking a prompt until it sounds less robotic. If that's your current process, you're not alone. Search interest around AI prompts for event planning, RFP writing, and venue sourcing has climbed steadily this year, and for good reason: a well-built prompt can turn a blank page into a working draft in seconds.

But there's a gap between "AI can help me write an RFP" and "AI wrote me a good RFP." Most of what's out there right now is a list of generic prompts with no context for venue sourcing specifically, and almost none of it mentions the part that actually matters: what happens when the AI gets a detail wrong and you don't catch it before it lands in a hotel sales director's inbox.

Here's how to actually use AI in your RFP process, where it earns its keep, where it can quietly cost you, and what to do instead.

Where AI Genuinely Saves You Time

AI is at its best when the job is structure and language, not facts. Three places it consistently helps:

Turning stakeholder chaos into a structured brief. You've got a Slack thread, a half-finished spreadsheet, and a verbal ask from your VP about room count. A prompt like "Turn these notes into a structured event brief with sections for dates, attendee count, meeting space needs, budget range, and must-haves" will organize that mess faster than you can do it by hand, and it gives you a clean starting point before you ever contact a single hotel.

Drafting the outreach itself. Writing the same RFP email to fifteen properties, each with a slightly different tone depending on whether it's a boutique independent hotel or a full-service convention property, is tedious. AI handles the first draft well: "Write a professional RFP outreach email to a hotel sales team for a 150-person, 2-night corporate conference in March, including dates, room block needs, and a request for a response within 10 business days."

Building your evaluation criteria before proposals come back. One of the more useful, less obvious prompts: ask AI to generate a comparison rubric based on your priorities. "Create a scoring framework for evaluating hotel proposals, weighted toward meeting space flexibility, AV costs, and cancellation terms." Having this ready before proposals arrive keeps you from comparing hotels on whichever detail happens to jump out first.

Used this way, AI is doing what it's actually good at: language, structure, and a faster first draft.

Where It Quietly Goes Wrong

The risk isn't that AI writes badly. It's that it writes confidently, even when it's wrong.

Ask a general-purpose AI tool for details about a specific hotel's meeting space capacity, current amenities, or contract terms, and it may answer with total conviction using outdated or invented information. Hotels renovate ballrooms, change AV vendors, and update cancellation policies constantly. A chatbot trained on whatever it last saw has no way of knowing that changed six months ago. If you paste that answer into an RFP, or worse, into a negotiation, you're not saving time. You're introducing an error you'll have to walk back later, in front of the exact person you're trying to build a relationship with.

The same goes for numbers. AI is fluent, not necessarily accurate, especially with anything specific: exact square footage, attrition percentages, cutoff dates, or F&B minimums. It will generate a plausible-sounding figure if you ask for one, and plausible is not the same as correct.

The fix isn't to avoid AI. It's to be clear about what you're asking it to do. Use it to draft and structure. Don't use it as your source of truth for anything you'd have to defend in a contract.

A Better Workflow: AI for Speed, Real Data for Accuracy

The planners getting the most out of AI right now aren't using it as a research tool. They're using it to move faster through the parts of the process that are actually about writing, and pairing it with a platform that supplies the parts that need to be true.

That's the gap Hopskip is built to close. Instead of asking a chatbot to guess at a hotel's current meeting space or hoping a generic AI prompt somehow knows a property's real rates, Hopskip pulls verified, up-to-date property data directly into your RFP and gives you a structured way to compare real proposals side by side, no fabricated square footage required. You get the speed of AI-assisted drafting on the front end, and a source of truth you can actually stand behind on the back end.

A simple rule of thumb: if a prompt is asking AI to write something, it's probably safe to use. If it's asking AI to know something specific about a hotel, verify it before it goes any further.

The Takeaway

AI is a genuinely useful tool for the writing side of RFPs: turning notes into a brief, drafting outreach, building your comparison criteria. It's a risky tool for the factual side: hotel details, contract terms, and anything with a specific number attached. Keep those two jobs separate, and you'll get the speed benefit without the cleanup work later.

Planners on Hopskip save 30+ hours per RFP, get cleaner proposals faster, and have all the information they need to make confident venue decisions. The best part? It's free to start for planners. Book a demo today to get started.