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Event Venue Marketplaces *

Market Summary – Event Venue Marketplaces

Market Overview

Event and Meeting Planners have many choices when finding the perfect venue for their company or client.  Event Venue Marketplaces (EVM) began to appear in recent years to make these choices more visible, searchable, and accessible to planners.  These days, planners can visit these sites to conduct everything from searching to initiating RFPs for prospective venues.  This dramatically simplifies the research phase of their venue selection.

The information within these sites presents planners with criteria they may choose to assist their venue research and find those venues meeting their event goals and search criteria.  The criteria range from venue size, location, seating capacity, amenities and many other options for creating the sought-after event experience.  Each EVM may provide various levels of depth in the available criteria and how far the planner may proceed along the venue research and selection process.

Venues typically control the information they include about their facility and how it is presented and branded within the EVM.  Therefore, the main question to consider after deciding whether the EVM is a potential source of group business is whether or not the EVM will advertise the venue to genuinely prospective audiences appropriate for their location and venue type.  Given the increasing number of EVM sites, the venue must determine those that fit this minimum qualification list before adding and updating their profile on each EVM they select as a marketing and distribution partner.

This Capsolve report emphasizes the 36 Event Venue Marketplaces across the restaurant, golf, and hotel industries, including vendors providing solutions to industries beyond the scope of Capsolve’s coverage, such as office space, stadiums, and theaters.  Capsolve identified EVM Solutions designed for these specific industries and classified the category size as Small.  The EVM is a newer concept to many businesses across these industries. Still, it continues to gain steam, given its time-saving and transparency-related features for both planners and venues alike.

The EVM companies in this research are located in select parts of the world, emphasizing the United States as a headquarters, followed by Europe and Asia each as a distant second.  Given these pockets of concentration, Capsolve classified this category as having Low geographic dispersion.

Marketplace Context

This category has certain features that provide a natural baseline for market entry, such as venue listing and a mechanism to contact the site or venues directly to verify a lead and even begin an RFP request to connect the event organizer to prospective venues. Additional capabilities create more diversity across vendors when viewing the comprehensive feature set across all their products.  This leads us to classify this category with a Low requirements complexity.

However, it is important to consider what your company wants to achieve by distributing its meeting and event inventory across one or more sites.  While implementing a partnership with numerous EVMs broadens your marketing reach, it also increases the complexity of your marketing and distribution project compared to selecting only one.  While much different in many respects, this category has similarities to managing Online Travel Agents for hotels, Food Marketplaces for restaurants, and Tee-time Marketplaces for the golf industry.  As EVMs broaden and deepen their reach into the event planning marketplace, it will be interesting to see how this segment continues toward a path of marketing, distribution, technology, and automation.

All of the solutions in this research are designed to create a marketing and distribution opportunity worth consideration.  We found a couple of key characteristics associated with these solutions, including the geographic reach of the site, the scope of data presented to prospective event planners, the breadth of services facilitated by the site, and the type of inventory listed on the site.  A venue may also want to consider the site’s focus on event types.  Selected sites even stretch the boundaries of what a venue may be able to support, such as selling office space.

Current Trends

1. A Rising Tide of Choice: We have gone from a handful to numerous EVMs in approximately 15 years.  This opportunity to drive revenue will go to the most creative sales efforts.
2. Connectivity: Interconnectivity is currently low in complexity but will change. The more EVMs that exist, the more important this need will become.
3. Centralization: Eventually, more EVMs will get on the radar of the Chains and Brands of the world, causing the use of EVMs to be a competitive necessity if it hasn’t already.
4. Automation: More EVMs, more venue descriptors, more connections, and more leads will continue to drive automation in this area.

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About this Report

This document reviews the marketing information and capabilities of this category’s solutions and the surrounding technology ecosystem. It contains original content written by Capsolve to provide a perspective of current trends affecting one or more of the hotel, restaurant, golf course, and country club industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.