Why Your Hotel RFPs Are Going Unanswered (And How to Fix It)

You spent an hour building the perfect RFP. You sent it to eight hotels. You're waiting.

Three days pass. Then a week. One hotel replies with a half-finished proposal. Two others send polite declines. The rest? Nothing.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. The average hotel RFP response rate sits at just 40-50%, according to Groups360. That means roughly half the hotels you contact on any given sourcing round simply don't write back. It's one of the most frustrating parts of the job, and it burns time that planners don't have to spare.

The good news is that most non-responses aren't random. There are specific, fixable reasons hotels don't reply — and once you understand them, you can dramatically improve your odds.

Hotels Are Triaging Their Inbox

Hotel sales managers receive dozens of RFPs every week. They can't respond to all of them with equal effort. So they triage.

When an RFP lands, a sales manager is essentially asking three questions: Does this event fit our property? Are these people serious buyers? And is this easy enough to quote quickly? If your RFP raises doubts on any of those three, it slides down the priority list. If it raises doubts on all three, it doesn't get a response at all.

Understanding that hotels are filtering, not ignoring, changes how you approach the problem. Your goal isn't to send more RFPs. It's to send RFPs that clear all three filters.

Reason 1: Your RFP Is Missing Key Information

The single biggest reason for non-response is an incomplete brief. Hotels can't price what they don't understand.

The most common missing elements are budget, decision timeline, and actual attendee count. When a sales manager sees an RFP with no budget range and a vague attendee count like "approximately 75-200 people," they have no way to know whether the business is worth pursuing. And if they have to email you to clarify five things before they can even begin a proposal, your RFP jumps back to the bottom of the queue.

Include specific dates, a confirmed or estimated headcount, a target room rate range, your F&B budget or per-person allowance, and when you plan to make a decision. That last one matters more than most planners realize. A clear decision timeline signals that you're serious and working to a real deadline — not just collecting quotes.

Reason 2: You Sent to Too Many Hotels

There's a counterintuitive truth here: sending to more hotels often gets you fewer responses.

When a hotel sales manager can see that an RFP went to a long list of properties, the perceived win probability drops. Why spend 45 minutes on a detailed proposal when you're one of 20 hotels competing for one event? The calculation shifts, and your RFP gets a minimal effort response or none at all.

The average hotel RFP response rate climbs to 80% or higher when you send to a targeted shortlist of 5-8 well-matched hotels, rather than blasting broadly. Mention in your RFP that you're working with a shortlist. It tells hotels they have a genuine shot, which makes it worth their time to compete.

Reason 3: The Format Is Hard to Work With

A wall of text in an email body is one of the slowest ways to get a hotel proposal. It takes the sales manager time to parse your requirements, and time to translate them into their own format.

Structured RFPs with clear sections — event overview, room block needs, meeting space requirements, F&B expectations, budget parameters — are faster to read and faster to respond to. When you pre-fill your requirements so the hotel only needs to add pricing and availability, you're doing some of the work for them. The less work a hotel has to do to create a proposal, the faster you get a response.

A consistent template also helps you compare proposals accurately once they come in. It's a win on both ends of the process.

Reason 4: Your Response Window Is Too Short

Planners under deadline pressure sometimes give hotels 24 or 48 hours to respond. This almost never works for anything beyond a very simple booking.

A realistic response window for a standard corporate event is 7-10 business days. Hotels need approximately 2-3 weeks to respond fully to larger or more complex programs. Shorter windows produce thinner responses, and they signal to sales teams that the event either lacks a real budget or is so urgent it might not happen at all.

If you're genuinely under time pressure, be upfront about it. Tell hotels you need a preliminary response by a certain date and a full proposal by another. Most good sales teams can accommodate a phased timeline if you're transparent about why.

Reason 5: The Property Isn't Actually a Good Fit

Sometimes the silence is a signal. If a 200-person conference RFP goes to a 60-room boutique hotel, a non-response is actually the most honest thing they can do.

Pre-qualifying your list saves everyone time. Before you send, confirm that the property has enough guest rooms for your block, meeting space that matches your setup requirements, and availability on your dates. A quick phone call or email to the sales team — letting them know an RFP is coming and confirming they can accommodate the event — lifts response rates meaningfully. For your top 2-3 preferred hotels, a brief intro call primes the sales team to look for your submission.

Reason 6: You're Not Following Up

Planners often assume no reply means no interest. In many cases, it means your RFP got buried.

One well-timed follow-up at the halfway point of your response deadline — confirming receipt, restating the due date, and offering to answer questions — can lift response rates by 20-30%. Keep it brief. You're not nudging; you're checking in.

What you don't want to do is follow up multiple times. More than one follow-up signals desperation and can reduce your negotiating position with the hotels that do reply. One is enough.

What Good Response Rates Actually Look Like

If you're consistently getting 40-50% response rates, that's the industry average — but it's not the ceiling. Planners who send targeted, detailed RFPs with realistic timelines to pre-qualified properties regularly see response rates of 70-85%.

That's not a small difference. On a sourcing round where you need three strong proposals to compare, a 40% response rate on eight hotels might give you three or four replies of varying quality. A 75% response rate gives you five or six, which means better options, more competition, and better pricing.

Because the average hotel response rate sits around 45%, planners are already sourcing 10-20% more properties just to get enough responses to work with. Every improvement to your RFP quality is time you're not spending chasing down replies.

The Sourcing Problem Is Solvable

Unanswered RFPs are almost never about bad luck. They're about misalignment — between what your RFP communicates and what hotels need to see in order to prioritize it.

Fix the brief. Target the list. Give a realistic window. Follow up once. Those four things alone will get you more responses, better proposals, and faster decisions.

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.

Sources

1. Easy RFP. (2026). How to Get Hotels to Actually Respond to Your RFP.
2. Easy RFP. (2026). Hotel RFP Timeline: How Long Should the Process Take?
3. Groups360. (2023). RFP Responses: Why Hotels Should Reply to Every RFP.
4. ReadyBid. (2025). Why Chasing Hotel Responses Is the Hidden Cost of RFPs.