A venue RFP sends one request to several venues at once, collects their proposals into one comparison, and tracks the award back on the event record.
Sourcing runs as one round from Onomi 360, and the bids return into the comparison here.
If an offer is negotiated further or a bid is accepted, that work happens in the connected sourcing partner's system.
The award and its status are pulled back onto the event record close to real time.
This guide explains completing and sending the RFP, comparing bids, recording the award and contracting the winner, and withdrawing a booking after an award.
For the search and the shortlist the RFP goes to, see Searching for venues and choosing how to book.
Sending the RFP and comparing bids
Multi-venue RFP management is at the center of the flow. One request goes to several venues at once, and the responses come back as structured proposals into one comparison.
- Open the request from the Sourcing module while it is in RFP draft status, and complete it.
Confirm the dates and their flexibility, the attendee count, the meeting rooms and room setups you need, the requested equipment, food and beverage requirements, accommodation requirements if any, and the budget.
Venues respond to what the request says, so complete anything missing before you go to market.
What you complete here is also what decides the award target. A request completed with accommodation requirements and no meeting rooms is the rooms-only request, and it starts on the Accommodation award target.
Any request that includes meeting space is the venue request, whether or not it also includes bedrooms. See Group accommodation and room blocks from sourcing.
- Review the shortlist you built in search, and remove any venue you no longer want to invite.
Tip: A focused shortlist outperforms a broad one. If you send the request to about four well-chosen venues, you get faster and more competitive responses than going wide.
Each venue knows it has a real chance of winning.
- Select Send RFP. The sourcing status moves to RFP active, on the request and on the event record. Every shortlisted venue is invited to respond.
Venues connected through direct hotel-chain APIs receive the request inside their own venue management systems, and return their pricing through the API with no re-keying on either side.
Your organization's terms are embedded in the RFP, and a venue acknowledges those terms when it submits its proposal. Every bid in the comparison was therefore made against terms the venue has already accepted.
Note: A request with an empty shortlist cannot be sent. Sending it returns "Add at least one venue to the shortlist before sending this RFP." and leaves the request in RFP draft.
- As venues respond, you see their proposals collect on the request, and the sourcing status moves to Bids received. Each proposal arrives as structured data, not a PDF quote.
A sent request remains open to the invited venues for 30 days.
If that response window closes with nothing returned, the request shows "No bids were returned before the response window closed." and remains at RFP active.
To go back to market, select Reopen RFP on the request. The request returns to RFP draft with its shortlist, its requirements, and any bids already returned.
You can then add or remove venues, and revise what you are asking for before going out again.
Selecting Send RFP a second time opens a new 30-day response window from the day you send it. The venues still on the shortlist are invited again.
- Open the bid comparison view. Venue rate comparison happens here.
You see the proposals side by side on rates, availability, inclusions, total estimated costs, concessions, and key contractual terms, with the capacities and dates each proposal includes beside them.
You can therefore see the trade-offs on one screen.
Sort the comparison by rate or by capacity, depending on which matters most for this event.
Filter it to the venues still in contention. You can export the comparison for the stakeholders who review the choice outside the platform.
Questions to a venue are asked and answered on its proposal, so you see a clarification and its answer beside the bid they concern.
The exchange remains on the request as the negotiation trail behind the award.
If the returned bids cluster above the event's budget, the negotiation continues in the connected sourcing partner's system. Open the request there with View in the sourcing system.
Negotiate with the venues still in contention, and accept the bid you settle on in that system. The accepted amount and the award return to this request close to real time.
The comparison keeps the bids as the venues returned them, and the event record shows what was finally agreed, so both are auditable.
Take a leading bid of EUR 41,200 negotiated down to EUR 38,900. The comparison keeps EUR 41,200 and the award records EUR 38,900.
If the market itself cannot meet the budget, take the request back to RFP draft with Reopen RFP, revise the shortlist or the requirements, and go out again.
- Accept the winning proposal in the connected sourcing partner's system, opened from the request with View in the sourcing system. The acceptance is made there, not in Onomi 360.
The award returns to the request close to real time, with the venue, the accepted amount, and the date it was accepted.
The two blocking venue rules are checked when the award arrives on the event record. A venue that was shortlisted before the rule was switched on therefore meets the block at this point.
An off-list venue in a market with Require listed venues switched on is refused with "This venue is not on the approved venue list for France. Select a listed venue.", and a venue of a restricted type is refused with "Venues of type casino and gaming are restricted for France. Select a venue of a permitted type."
An approved venue list that only flags does not stop the award. A refused award leaves the venue unbooked on the record.
You can go forward with another venue on the shortlist, or ask an organization administrator to put the venue on the market's approved venue list before the award returns again. See Setting venue rules in Onomi 360.
Once the award is recorded, the sourcing status moves to RFP awarded. The winning venue's entry on the event record is marked as the event's booked venue.
The entries of the venues that were compared and not chosen remain on the record as compared.
Awarding also updates the budget. The awarded amount lands in the Committed column of the event budget, attributed to that award.
It lands under the budget category with Sourcing award target set to Venue, or to Accommodation if the award is a rooms-only room-block request. The final invoice settles the Actual column through reconciliation.
An award has one target category, so a request that includes both the meeting space and the accommodation requirements commits in full to Venue.
See Group accommodation and room blocks from sourcing. Sourcing award target is a setting on each budget category in your organization's category hierarchy.
It tells an award which category to write to, whatever your organization named that category. Nothing is re-keyed between sourcing and budget. See Setting up budgets: categories, bands, and policies, which documents the setting.
- Verify the write-back. Open the event record and check that the chosen venue, the agreed rates, and the awarded costs now show on the record.
The sourcing status should read RFP awarded, with the awarded amount in the budget's Committed column.
You see the venue entries per event, on the event record, in its Venue section and its Sourcing module.
Each entry shows its venue-rule result. No cross-event sourcing report or export includes them, so a portfolio-level check means opening the event records.
The awarded amount is the exception. The award wrote it into the Committed column of the budget category with the Sourcing award target it needed.
Cost lines on event records are what the Costs report, the costs entity of the report builder, and the reinvoicing summaries read.
The money is therefore visible across events, even though the venue entry behind it is not.
Note: A sourcing request has no separate cancel or withdraw. A request that is never awarded remains at the status it has reached: RFP draft, RFP active, or Bids received.
It remains there until it is awarded, or until the event itself is cancelled. Cancelling the event closes an active RFP toward the invited venues.
See Following sourcing across your events in How to source a venue from your event.
Checking a request's award target before you send
Check what a request includes before you send it, because sending is what fixes its award target (see Group accommodation and room blocks from sourcing).
A request has its award target from the moment it goes to market: the send on the RFP route, and the confirmation of the booking on the instant-booking route.
It keeps that target until the event is cancelled, or until Reopen RFP returns it to RFP draft.
On a reopened request the derivation rule applies again, exactly as it does to a request that has never been sent. The target is re-fixed when the request is sent again.
An award settles the target on that request for the life of the event. The settled target is why Reopen RFP does not return an awarded request.
It is also why a replacement venue is agreed with the venue directly and recorded on the event record, not taken back to market.
You can therefore recover a request sent on the wrong target.
If a request that includes both meeting-space and accommodation requirements went to market as the venue request, select Reopen RFP, remove the meeting space, and send it again as the accommodation request.
A reopened request has no target while it is in RFP draft.
What still enforces the limit of one request per award target there is the send-time refusal, "This event already holds a venue sourcing request. Remove the meeting space from this request to send it as an accommodation request, or work the existing venue request." A draft is refused if its derived target already belongs to another request on the event.
When a request never reaches an award
The Sourcing module is what anyone checks to see whether the venue is secured. A request left open without an award therefore shows as sourcing still in progress. Two cases are worth handling deliberately.
- If you book the venue outside the sourcing flow, tell the invited venues that the RFP is not proceeding.
Then record the venue and its cost directly on the event record, so the record shows the booking your team actually made.
Searching for venues and choosing how to book names who records a venue in the Venue section of the event record, and what happens if a venue rule blocks the venue being recorded.
- If the meeting moves to another market, tell the venues invited under the old shortlist.
If the request has already been sent, take it back to RFP draft with Reopen RFP. Then search the new market, rebuild the shortlist, and send it again.
Contracting the awarded venue
Once the award is confirmed, the agreement with the venue follows your legal and signature process. The connected sourcing flow supports DocuSign workflows for electronic signature.
The contract status on the event record
The event record keeps the contract's status, and not the paper itself.
The awarded venue's entry shows the contract as Executed, with the date and the platform it was executed on, for example "Executed April 3, 2026, in DocuSign".
The entry states plainly that the status and date are recorded on the record, while the signed agreement remains on the signature platform.
The record therefore answers whether the contract is executed, when, and which platform it is on. You can retrieve the agreement itself from the platform it was signed on.
The agreement is assembled from the terms your organization has already negotiated with the venue or hotel group, which the sourcing flow brings into it.
Those terms were embedded in the RFP and acknowledged by the venue at proposal submission.
A booking therefore starts from the paper your legal team has already negotiated, and not from the venue's own template. See Where your organization's terms live in Setting venue rules in Onomi 360.
Contract management therefore ends on the event record. You see the contract status, the award, and the final contracted costs there, alongside the rest of the event's financial records.
View in the sourcing system on the request opens the award and the contract as the sourcing partner keeps them.
The control is a secondary one beside the record, not the main action, because the detail behind the status is in that system.
Purchase requisitions and purchase orders remain in your procurement platform, exactly as your procurement policies require. Onomi keeps the awarded costs on the event record so the event view and the procurement view agree.
An implementation-scoped procurement connection can return the purchase-requisition and purchase-order references to the event, followed by the invoice and final cost from the ERP. See Connecting finance, procurement, travel, and transparency systems.
Withdrawing a booking after an award
Sometimes the event goes ahead but the booking does not, for example after your compliance organization rules the venue out, or after the venue itself falls through.
The withdrawal is then recorded on the event record, not on the sourcing request.
An awarded request has no cancel and no withdraw, and it is not reopened either. Reopen RFP returns only a sent request that has not been awarded, so the request remains at RFP awarded.
The Sourcing module therefore keeps showing RFP awarded for the event. If a booking has been withdrawn, the event still shows as having a venue until the record says otherwise.
The steps below bring the record back in line with what your team has actually booked.
- Cancel the booking with the venue under the terms of the award, and tell the venue directly, as the platform sends nothing on your behalf here.
- Record the replacement venue in the Venue section of the event record. Select Add venue, then enter it as free text or pick it from the market's approved venue list.
You see it as a venue entry of its own, and it becomes the event's booked venue. The withdrawn venue's entry is marked withdrawn and remains on the record beside it.
Two groups can make that entry: the planners of the event's workspace (Manager or Editor), and holders of the finance role with the event in their scope.
On a record-only event that has no workspace, only the finance role can. See Role-based access and visibility for internal and external stakeholders.
Add venue is a block point like shortlisting and the award.
In a market with Require listed venues switched on, recording an off-list replacement is refused with "This venue is not on the approved venue list for France. Select a listed venue." You can then select a venue on the market's approved list, or ask an organization administrator to add the venue to that list first. See Setting venue rules in Onomi 360.
- Settle the cost line the award already wrote, then mark it reconciled. Awarding put the awarded amount in the Committed column of the target category.
Withdrawing the booking does not change that line, because the sourcing request remains at RFP awarded and nothing is reversed automatically.
Enter what the withdrawal actually cost as the line's Actual amount: the cancellation fee, or zero if no fee is charged. The commitment is then settled. Entering that amount is an ordinary cost-line edit.
Holders of the finance role with the event in their scope can make it, and so can the planners of the event's workspace.
On a record-only event that has no workspace, only the finance role can.
If your finance process clears the line instead of settling it at zero, you can remove it with Remove cost line.
The same two groups have that control. A line a confirmed allocation has already read is reopened first.
The amount on its own does not release the event.
A line left open on the withdrawn booking keeps the event open at the end, because an event cannot be closed while a cost line is unreconciled. Mark the line reconciled with Mark reconciled.
The close waits on that change, and it belongs to the event's finance owner and to the other holders of the finance role with the event in their scope.
See Reconciliation, invoices, and closing the event for both paths and for Mark reconciled.
- Record the replacement venue's cost on the event budget as a new cost line. The withdrawn award's line shows what the cancellation cost, and the replacement line shows what the new venue costs.
The venue commitment is therefore not counted twice. See How to use the Budget module.
The record after a withdrawal
The withdrawn venue's entry remains on the record, marked withdrawn, with its venue-rule result and the award it was made under.
It is beside the replacement's entry, which is now the event's booked venue. An auditor therefore sees what was booked, why it changed, and what the change cost.
A replacement is not taken back to market on the same event. The venue award target is already used by the awarded request.
The replacement venue is agreed with the venue directly and recorded on the record, the same way a venue booked outside the sourcing flow is recorded.
* Onomi 360 MeetingsEQ exclusive capabilities.
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