Event Venue Marketplaces

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Market Summary

Market Overview

Event and Meeting Planners have a plethora of choices when it comes to 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 contained 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 criteria they make available and how far the planner may proceed along the venue research and selection process.

Venues typically control the information they include about their facility in addition to 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 truly prospective audiences appropriate for their location and venue type.  Given the increasing number of EVM sites, the venue will need to determine those that fit this minimum qualification list before spending the time to add and update their profile on each EVM they select as a marketing and distribution partner.

This Capsolve report emphasizes the Event Venue Marketplaces across the restaurant, golf and hotel industries, with inclusion of vendors also 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, but 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 selected parts of the world, with an emphasis on the United States as a headquarters preference, 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 a certain set of 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 of 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 as 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 or 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.

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About this Report

This document details a review of the marketing information and capabilities associated with 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 and golf & country clubs industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.