What
Would You Do???
Each month it falls to me to generate dunning letters for members who have made reservations and either cancelled too late or haven’t attended the dinner meeting.
I’m sure that if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of these you have not been delighted to see it, after all you’ve already paid annual dues which include as many as ten (10) dinners for those who are able and interested in attending dinner meetings.
The association must give a guaranteed head count by noon of Monday of the week of the meeting.
-
So if your reservation arrives after noon on that day, we ask that you
remit $10.00 for the
inconvenience to the hotel by changing the headcount. - If the association doesn’t guarantee as many as attend we incur a surcharge of $75.00 per table for the hotel to set up tables after the fact.
- Similarly, when members do not attend the association is billed $26.00 per no show, up to the guaranteed headcount.
As you can see it is somewhat critical that we be accurate, to avoid wasting association funds.
We do allow members to cancel anytime before 5:00 p.m. the day before (Wednesday) without penalty of any sort. Email, fax or voice mail messages all work here.
Sadly, this month we had one person cancel accordingly, while six members waited until the day of the meeting to let us know they would not be attending. The cost to the association amounts to $156.00. To be sure emergencies happen, forcing late cancellations and no shows, but knowing where to draw the line is sticky business.
Worse than that we had a record 13 no shows for the evening, which totals $338.00. These two totaled $494.00 or almost 20% of our food bill for the evening. Can an association long endure with such folly?
If you can think of a better and/or a more fair way to handle this I’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to send dunning letters on behalf of our Treasurer and hoping you will respond to them.
Chuck Ayres, C.P.M.
Executive Secretary
NAPM-Orange County
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