MF : What tips then do you have for venues to work around this ? GP : It is a complex world in the hospitality space . Last year , the president of one of the major chains said : “ Digitisation is the opportunity for hoteliers to really capture a disproportionate market share moving forward ”. The challenge for a lot of these hotels , and the reason they ’ re slow to embrace digitisation , is because many use legacy systems .

The need is there to integrate these systems . The process has got to be to start with looking at data properly and improving business intelligence , for which there are lots of software platforms . The data can be used to provide insight into your customer base , where you are winning business from , where you are sourcing it , where you are not winning it , right down to the individual planner within an association .

You start looking at where you can capture business and from where you can ’ t . The need is to say that there is no point in having 500 leads if I could only respond to 200 and then only convert a small portion of them . It is far better to receive 200 and convert a higher percentage .

Venues must look at their operational systems and identify where they are falling down . Organisers need faster responses , so if you respond faster and are more knowledgeable in your responses , you ’ re going to get more business .

Are these RFPs reaching the right person , and do they have the capacity to handle it effectively ? If not , you need to look at automating the entire process .

We all know that an event , from the point of contracting through to the day of delivery , changes multiple times . We know that hotel room lists for guests who are staying can change on average seven to nine times during the event cycle . How do we facilitate that without the need for human intervention and manual labour ? There are a lot of tools that are

available to cover these things .

MF : Cvent recently acquired UK-based booking platform Venuedirectory . com , and they champion the ‘ instant book ’ concept . What is the future on this ? GP : Yes , instant book is coming . And why wouldn ’ t you do it ? We do it in everything else in the world , why wouldn ’ t a venue do it with meeting spaces , in the context of simple meetings ?

It will allow hotels to forge closer relationships with corporates .

The reticence , however , comes when hotels want to be able to control the rates relative to demand and dates .

Venuedirectory . com , which Cvent acquired earlier in 2022 , is a ‘ semi-instant ’ platform . There are several parameters you can set within your instant book system . You can set anything that gets sourced within zero to 14 days , as an example , as instantly bookable . If it ’ s post 14 days , the hotelier can make sure that the customer can ’ t instantly book , and instead must submit an inquiry .

This demand is very much being driven by the customer side . When you look at large banks , for example , they will often hold over 2,000 events each year , and a large portion of those will be small , simple meetings , sometimes booked only a few days in advance . A call for RFPs isn ’ t going to be practical in those instances . This is where instant-book will work .

MF : Cvent recently revealed the latest findings from its October 2022 Planner Sourcing Report , Europe Edition . Can you give us an overview ? GP : This is an independent piece of research that we do biannually , surveying 500 organisations across Europe over 500 event planners , managers , coordinators and directors across the UK and Europe . We ask them questions around what they need from hotels , what their needs are in

“ Instant book is coming . And why wouldn ’ t you do it ? We do it in everything else in the world , why wouldn ’ t a venue do it with meeting spaces , in the context of simple meetings ?”

terms of event planning . The first takeaway from the most recent research was that right now 90 % of organisers are sourcing for in-person events , which is really encouraging . 65 % of those are sourcing for events in the next quarter ( Q4 2022 ), 83 % reported that they expect to host more in-person events in 2023 when compared to 2019 , and 60 % of them are saying that their budgets are going to be somewhat or significantly larger than they were in 2019 . 65 % state their budgets are bigger for in-person and hybrid events than they were in 2019 .

As we move into 2023 , I think a lot of that is brought about by the fact that if you look at the adoption of virtual technology over the past couple of years . We ’ ve been forced to adapt because we had no other choice . An event for 200 people now reaches 1,000 , and people who attended virtually before now want to experience it in-person .

It ’ s going to cost more to facilitate a virtual and an in-person event , but actually the return on investment is multiple times higher .

MF : How should organisers measure ROI ? GP : This is where technology comes into play , that ’ s nothing new . Technology exists where you can actively engage over virtual events , you can talk one-to-one with product experts , you can register in and out of any session you like , or enter an exhibition stand virtually and have conversations in that environment . The beauty of that is that the platform will capture all that data about your behaviour , what you ’ ve done , what you haven ’ t done across the course of that event . That is used to then determine the ROI at the back end .

ROI is never going to be precise because somebody attending an event to look at products might buy three years later , but it does give you far more insight into what ’ s happening .