vs. Groups360

A Groups360 alternative for everything after the booking

GroupSync is genuinely good at finding and booking group rooms — instant booking, live rates, free to the planner. Blocks picks up where that stops: the contract you signed, every cut-off on it, attrition per night, the departments submitting rooms, and the rooming list the hotel sends back.

Groups360 sources and books group hotel rooms through GroupSync — instantly or by RFP, at no cost to the planner. Blocks is the alternative for managing the block afterwards: it reads the contract, tracks every cut-off and attrition deadline, does the per-night room-night math, collects rooms from department leads, and audits the rooming list the hotel returns. Many teams use both.

Blocks vs. Groups360

Capability	Blocks	Groups360 (GroupSync)
Search a hotel marketplace and book group rooms instantlyGroupSync books instantly online or via its RFP builder; Blocks starts from the agreement you already have.	No	Yes
Send hotel RFPsBlocks builds the RFP from your departments’ requests as a night-by-night demand table.	Yes	Yes
Cost to the plannerGroups360 states there is no cost to use GroupSync and no booking fees; Blocks publishes list pricing and is paid by you.	Published list pricing	Free to planners
Read a hotel contract and extract rates, cut-offs and attrition terms	Yes	No
Review a contract against your negotiation playbookBlocks contract review is decision support, not legal advice.	Yes	No
Track attrition exposure per night against what you committedGroups360 says attrition concerns "become more actionable ahead of time" on GroupSync Housing, which is sold to hoteliers.	Yes	Hotel-side housing
Alert you before a cut-off or attrition deadline	Yes	No
Attendee booking site for a room blockGroupSync Housing gives each block its own personalized website; in Blocks guests book and pay on a branded page drawn from your block inventory.	Yes	Yes
Audit the hotel’s returned rooming list against yoursBlocks reconciles the version a hotel sends back, row by row, and proposes every correction.	Yes	No
Private request portal for each department lead, with an approvals queue	Yes	No
Track hotel conversations as loops — sent, waiting on, came back	Yes	No
Your own directory of hotels you have worked with, with your contactsGroupSync searches the hotel market; the Blocks directory is your organization’s own history and private contacts.	Yes	Marketplace search
Per-person staff and crew travel alongside the roomsFlights, ground transport, supervisor and employment status per traveller, when you collect travel.	Yes	No

Competitor names are trademarks of their respective owners. Feature information from public materials as of September 4, 2026.

“We booked the block in about ten minutes. Then it lived in a spreadsheet for nine months.”

Blocks holds the nine months. Upload the contract and it pulls out the rates, cut-offs and attrition terms in under 60 seconds, then keeps every deadline on the block itself.

“Nobody could tell me what we would owe if we came in twenty rooms short on the Thursday.”

Attrition is tracked per night against what you committed, and every figure says what it is based on — a real clause, an assumed pickup, or nothing on file. A settled block quotes no exposure at all.

“The block was the easy part. Collecting the names from nine departments took two months.”

Each department lead gets a private link with no login where they add rooms or upload their own spreadsheet — and the changes that would cost you something come to you as approvals.

“The hotel sent back the rooming list in their own format and I checked 300 rows by eye.”

The rooming-list audit reads the hotel’s file on its own terms — its room codes, its name format — and hands you the short list of what actually differs, each fix proposed for you to confirm.

What is the best Groups360 alternative for managing the block after you book it?

Blocks, and the reason is that the two products barely overlap. Groups360 positions GroupSync around sourcing and booking: search hotels, see live rates and availability, and book instantly online or through an RFP builder, with its marketplace promising low group pricing — up to 60% off standard room rates — and risk-free cancellation, at no cost to the planner and no booking fees. Its own framing is that "booking a hotel room block is as easy as booking a single hotel room online". That is a real and useful thing, and it is the front of the job. Blocks is the back of it. Once you have signed something, the work becomes reading what you signed, watching the dates it created, filling the rooms, and reconciling what the hotel says at the end against what you actually sent. Blocks extracts the rates, cut-offs and attrition terms from the contract in under 60 seconds, reviews it against your negotiation playbook and hands you a ranked issues list as decision support rather than legal advice, then tracks the block per night from there.

How is Blocks different from GroupSync?

GroupSync is a marketplace with housing attached; Blocks is a system of record for the commitment. The GroupSync products Groups360 names are Marketplace, Housing, Planner+, Commerce and Marketing, and the split in its navigation is telling: the site divides into For Organizers and For Travel Partners, and GroupSync Housing sits on the travel-partner side, sold to hoteliers. Its housing description is written from the hotel’s chair — each room block gets its own personalized website where guests book, you see "who’s in, who’s out, and who needs a nudge", reporting shows how blocks are performing, and attrition concerns "become more actionable ahead of time". Blocks is written from the buyer’s chair for the whole of that same period. It reads your contract rather than the hotel’s inventory. It computes attrition against the commitment you made, per night, never netted across nights. It gives your department leads their own request portals and routes their changes through an approvals queue with a three-way diff. It models each hotel conversation as a loop — what you sent, what you are waiting on, what came back — and flags a thread when a property has been quiet about three business days. And it audits the returned rooming list rather than accepting it.

Does Groups360 track attrition, cut-offs or read hotel contracts?

Its organizer materials do not describe any of the three. The organizer side of GroupSync is about finding hotels, seeing rates and availability, booking instantly or by RFP, and then managing the block and tracking reservations; contract extraction, cut-off tracking and reconciliation of a returned rooming list are not features it names. The one attrition mention we found is on the GroupSync Housing page, which is sold to hoteliers, and says attrition concerns become more actionable ahead of time — a hotel-side statement about a hotel-side product. That is a fair split of the market rather than a gap to be scored: a booking marketplace has no reason to read your contract. It matters only if you assumed the tool that got you the block would also watch it. In Blocks the contract is the starting point: the terms come out of the document, every deadline it creates lands on the block, attrition exposure is computed per night against what you committed, and a number always travels with the basis it was computed from — a real clause, an assumed pickup with the assumption stated, or nothing on file.

Can I use GroupSync to book and Blocks to run the block?

Yes, and for a lot of teams that is the right shape. GroupSync costs the planner nothing — Groups360 says there is no cost to use it and no booking fees — so there is no commercial reason to stop sourcing there. Book where the rates are, then bring the signed agreement into Blocks: upload the contract, let it pull out the rates, cut-offs, attrition terms and concessions, and work the block from there. Blocks imports the spreadsheets you already keep and exports CSV and Excel everywhere, so nothing has to be re-keyed in either direction. If you also send your own RFPs, Blocks does that too, built from your departments’ actual requests as a night-by-night demand table, with replies landing in that event’s Comms as a tracked loop — and it suggests properties near your venue when you add a city. The honest division is that Groups360 is paid by hotels and helps you find them; Blocks is paid by you and sells nothing to the properties you work with.

When Groups360 is the right choice

Groups360 is the right choice when the job is finding and booking the rooms. If you need live rates and availability across a wide hotel market, want to book a block online without running an RFP cycle, and would rather not pay for the tool at all, GroupSync is built for exactly that: instant booking or proposal booking from one place, group pricing the marketplace describes as up to 60% off standard room rates, risk-free cancellation, and no cost or booking fees to the planner. Groups360 also runs dedicated paths for sports and team travel, weddings and enterprise booking, plus a whole travel-partner side for hoteliers, DMOs and convention bureaus — so if your work is sourcing across many small events, or you sit on the hotel side of the table, that breadth is the product. Blocks fits after the signature, and for the teams whose difficulty was never finding a hotel: reading the contract, watching every cut-off, computing attrition per night, collecting rooms and names from department leads through their own portals, tracking crew travel alongside the rooms, and auditing the list the hotel returns. Booking there and running it here is a normal combination, not a compromise.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

What is a good alternative to Groups360 GroupSync?

It depends which half of the job you mean. For sourcing and booking group rooms, GroupSync is strong and costs the planner nothing. For everything after the booking, Blocks is the alternative: it reads the contract you signed, tracks every cut-off and attrition deadline, does the per-night attrition math, gives department leads their own request portals with an approvals queue, and audits the rooming list the hotel returns. Plenty of teams book on GroupSync and run the block in Blocks.

Does GroupSync track attrition and cut-off dates?

Its organizer materials do not name either. The organizer side of GroupSync covers finding hotels, live rates and availability, instant or RFP booking, and then managing the block and tracking reservations. The one attrition mention appears on the GroupSync Housing page, which Groups360 sells to hoteliers. Blocks computes attrition per night against the commitment in your contract and puts every extracted deadline on the block, with a figure always stating what it is based on.

Groups360 is free. Why would I pay for Blocks?

Because they are paid by different people to do different things. Groups360 states there is no cost to use GroupSync and no booking fees — it earns from the hotel side of the marketplace. Blocks is paid by you and sells nothing to the properties you work with, which is what lets it sit on your side of the contract: reading the terms, flagging what is worth negotiating, tracking your exposure, and reconciling what a hotel claims at the end against what you sent. If your only difficulty is finding rooms, a free marketplace is the right tool.

Can Blocks import a block I booked through GroupSync?

Yes. Upload the signed contract and Blocks extracts the rates, cut-offs, attrition terms and concessions from it, then builds the block’s per-night inventory from there. It also imports the room-block and rooming-list spreadsheets you already keep, and exports CSV and Excel everywhere, so nothing has to be re-keyed in either direction. Where you booked the rooms makes no difference to what Blocks can read.

Does Blocks give guests a booking page like GroupSync Housing does?

Yes. Guests can book and pay for their own rooms on a branded page drawn from your real block inventory, and every booking lands against the contract’s per-night math. The difference is whose product it is: GroupSync Housing is sold to hoteliers and gives each block a personalized site on the hotel’s side, while in Blocks the page belongs to your event and the reservations sit next to the terms that decide what they cost. Rooms that come from department leads rather than self-booking guests get their own private request portal.

Have more questions? Check our glossary of terms or get in touch.

How Blocks does it

Contract review Attrition tracking Deadline tracking Hotel directory

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