Instant Booking
for Meetings —
The Long Chase
RFPs will always offer buyers the chance
to negotiate; there are revenue management
issues on the supply side as well.
So what’s the use case?
Even amid a growing slate of direct booking technology solutions for small meetings, many corporate meetings buyers are not ready to let go of the request-for-proposals process, but overall tech penetration into the small meeting space has significant room for growth.
Only 2 percent of respondents in BTN's meetings survey said they use a specialized instant-booking marketplace—in which hotels, meeting spaces and packages such as AV or food and beverage services can be booked at a set price rather than going through negotiations—as a sourcing tool for small meetings. Specialized platforms for small meetings RFPs, by comparison, are used by 12 percent of respondents.
Instant booking opportunities have seen significant growth over recent years. Cvent last year, for example, integrated its Instant Book tool within Choice Hotels International's hotel booking engine last year and integrated 6,000 venues from MeetingPackage into the tool. Groups360—which has partnerships with hotel giants including Marriott, Hilton, Wyndham and Omni for instant-booking capabilities outside of global distribution systems—reports access to about 3 million rooms globally and more than 3,000 hotels offering meeting space, according to chief customer officer Tim Flors.
Groups360 started solely as an RFP sourcing platform 10 years ago but has broadened to instant booking as part of a larger goal of simplifying the process for planners, he said.
"Our planners were saying they were spending a ton of time booking smaller, simpler meetings that are just taking so much time only because, one, there's a high quantity of those meetings," Flors said. "There's [also] a super slow response rate or no response rate. If you're a 10-room group sending an RFP to a big hotel, it's less likely to get a response."
"There's … a super slow response rate or no response rate. If you're a 10-room group sending an RFP to a big hotel, it's less likely to get a response."
Travel technology companies such as Amadeus, meanwhile, have been building the content and booking capabilities for group spaces at hotels, with both Cvent and Groups360 among its partners, Amadeus director of product, meeting and event distribution Rich Matthes said. Hotels facing sales staffing challenges after the Covid-19 pandemic has given some impetus to growth.
"Hotels need an easier way for the customers to interact with them," Matthes said. "It's how we can make it easier for the customer and how they can be more efficient as a sales team."
Instant booking for meetings as a concept, however, is hardly new, and some players in the space already have come and gone over the years, said Bizly founder and CEO Ron Shah.
"We had a whole cast of characters going instant book 10 to 20 years ago," Shah said. "Starwood had an instant booking tool. Kimpton had an instant booking tool. Both objectively failed."
Bizly itself was among that cast, starting as an instant booking solution before later pivoting to a "speed RFP" solution, he said.
Instant Booking Obstacles
So, if instant booking for meetings is not a nascent technology and takes a potentially slow RFP step out of the process, what might account for the seemingly slow adoption by corporate meeting managers and organizers?
Part of it is a pure inventory issue, Groupize founder and chief customer officer Charles de Gaspe Beaubien said. As a demonstration, he did a search for a small meeting space booking in Boston through some large hotel chains. One had no availability for instant booking at all; others had only one or two options in limited-service properties on the outskirts of the city.
That largely stems from hotels' revenue management strategies, he said. Hoteliers want to ensure those booking their meeting spaces are the ones that will bring them the maximum revenue, and therefore they usually limit instant booking capabilities to the smallest rooms—board rooms, for example—and even those they hold until about a month and a half out.
"The revenue managers don't want to play ball; therefore, there is no inventory in these systems," de Gaspe Beaubien said. "It sounds good—I can book in real time with no contract—but there's just no inventory coming. Will that change? My bet is no."
If anyone can build the marketplace, meetings and hospitality tech giant Cvent would be positioned to do so. Cvent VP of product management Jim Abramson said that process has been "slow-going" and made the comparison of how online travel agencies originally had to build content in the early years of online booking.
"It's a combination of control and giving that up, and the terms and having the connection between the planners and the hotels," he said. "The smallest part is technology, but it's still a bit of a barrier for the smaller players, because if they have the technology, they have to plug it into channels—and right now, there's not that many channels out there."
The buyer side has its share of problems with instant booking for meetings as well. Shah said the primary reason Bizly moved away from it is that planners consistently were using a box for notes in the booking interface to make multiple requests, which the company was not able to solve against easily.
"There was some customization, hand-holding and individualized needs that were constantly coming up," he said.
At a glance, Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service would seem like the perfect fit for instant meetings technology, as director of global travel and corporate meetings Marty Hoski said it has mostly small meetings of under 50 attendees—about 100 last year, and closer 500 to 600 per year prior to the pandemic. The company tried instant booking with Cvent, but "it didn't work for us," he said.
One problem was on the content side, as the conference center hotel that sits on the ETS campus did not want its meeting room inventory to be taken off the top and risk having a single meeting room reserved for a small event if a large company came in and wanted to do a deal for the full property, Hoski said. There's also a procedural issue, as ETS' internal clients are not authorized to sign contracts, but if they go in and make an instant booking, that is essentially what they have done.
"I could see it working for a third-party meeting planning company, but I don't see it fitting the need that a corporate buyer would have," Hoski said. "In the peer groups, we talk to, I don't hear about anybody actually using it."
"I could see it working for a third-party meeting planning company, but I don't see it fitting the need that a corporate buyer would have. In the peer groups, we talk to, I don't hear about anybody actually using it."
Regulation also is a barrier to instant booking adoption in certain industries. Steve Sitto, who is the associate director for procurement in a life sciences company, said the technology "wouldn't work for us" due to regulations around compiling competing bids for events. "We have very thorough global procurement guidelines around sourcing for everything, and we have to make sure we are following those guidelines."
For regulatory reasons or otherwise, 53 percent of respondents in BTN's survey said their small meetings policy includes a requirement of getting competing bids.
As such, the shift to instant booking is less about adopting a new technology and more about change management, Cvent's Abramson said. It's still no guarantee of getting the best rate, for example, as Abramson said Cvent often sees instant-book rates offered, and then a company sends an RFP to get a better rate.
"The bottom line is that RFPs have been king, and they remain to be currently," Abramson said. "But the future is open for opportunity."
After all, 48 percent of respondents in the survey said they currently use no sourcing tools for small meetings, so that leaves a big chunk for potential development
A Future for Instant Booking?
Part of that opportunity comes in a shift in small meeting needs. While meeting spaces have proven a challenge in instant booking, Abramson noted that Cvent has seen a decline the mix of RFPs that are for meeting space only. That stems in part from a growth in internal meetings, for which companies will use their own space for the meetings and need only the hotels for incoming travelers. In BTN's survey, 72 percent of respondents said their small meetings policy requires planners to consider onsite spaces before offsite.
Bizly's Shah said room blocks are more appealing to hotels for instant book technology, as it is possible to apply revenue management mathematics and logic around them more easily. Beyond that, there is a space for instant booking in some aspects of small events, he said.
"What we think is the future of instant book will be bundled packages, with some levels of configurability," Shah said. "You can change the layout of the room, pick out how many people and some requests and requirements and make it work."
As an example, Shah pointed to event and experience platform Kapow, which Cvent acquired in 2018. The platform had found success in offering bookings for such packages as private room dining at restaurants or private screenings at movie theaters.
Shared office space suppliers such as WeWork and Regus also tend to be instant-book and don't generally go through a sourcing platform, Groupize's de Gaspe Beaubien said. That typically is the space only and doesn't include options for extras, such as food and beverage, and those would need to be negotiated separately.
Technology providers also are adding functionality that could address procedural obstacles, such as those outlined by ETS' Hoski. Groups360 recently launched a "Planners Plus" tool that enables the owner of the meetings program to set up approval processes within their meeting requests form, Flors said. As of now, that functionality is only available for RFPs, but the company will later add it for instant booking as well, he said.
"Why am I spending all this time on this small meeting that is only worth X thousands of dollars when I should be spending more time on these bigger things that are more complicated and worth more?"
There will always be the opportunity to achieve a better price through negotiations, but Cvent's Abramson said instant booking still can win out in the appropriate circumstances due to the time factor for both planners and suppliers.
"Why am I spending all this time on this small meeting that is only worth X thousands of dollars when I should be spending more time on these bigger things that are more complicated and worth more?" he said. "We're not quite there yet, but the reason we believe this ultimately will happen is because it's a time savings for both sides."
AI Adoption
As with any segment of the managed travel industry, AI stands to significantly change meetings management technology in the coming years, and as RFPs and RFIs will be a part of that process for the foreseeable future, they are a prime target for the technology.
Cvent in the coming months will launch new AI capabilities both on the planner and supplier sides, Abramson said. For planners, one upcoming feature is AI-powered search, with which planners could start typing their needs in natural language and see results without having to work in filter boxes. In the RFP, Cvent is targeting what Abramson said is the "biggest pain point," which is building an agenda.
"We're using AI to help improve that," Abramson said. "People have it typed out in email or a Word doc, and they'll be able to copy and paste it in and generate it."
On the supplier side for RFP, Cvent is starting out with capabilities to answer custom questions from buyers, which can be numerous and time-consuming in filling out RFPs, he said. "We've created this AI-powered prototype we're going to give to suppliers to pre-fill these custom questions with their answers, because they've given the answer before, or they've given us the answer through the prepared questions we're going to use."
Bizly's Shah said pricing is another big area of opportunity for AI in meetings technology. With meetings pricing even more fluctuating and "lumpy" than transient hotel pricing, AI could help buyers know which dates could offer the best pricing versus those to avoid because there's another huge event in town.
"Right now, customers have no clue; it's a complete shot in the dark," Shah said. "There is no pricing intelligence or data in this space, and that's another massive opportunity for AI."
Groupize's de Gaspe Beaubien said he doesn't see the meetings management side as the big opportunity for AI in the industry, however. With AI, Groupize is focusing more on building something on the reconciliation side, reading folios and helping resolve the final costs of meetings. On the planning side, he said bots that can answer questions to build a meeting are less of a focus.
"Sometimes those can be more cumbersome than filling out a form," he said. "I think it's cute, but it's not going to change the world."
Shah said AI assistants helping with the planning stages "could change things for the industry," but he said it is only a "front door" to deeper changes that are needed.
"If the AI agent has understood my needs and done it all, but then I still don't see good content and have to wait for RFP responses and signed contracts, it's still broken," Shah said. "You're not going to see change until you change the entire stack."
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