– Start of Protected Content –

Get free access to this complete Report and your own personalized Account, including the following content:

Group Booking Engines *

Market Summary – Group Booking Engines

Market Overview

The choices for owners and managers of venues to have their event space booked online are increasing. Group Booking Engines (GBE) and their various styles allow venues to provide booking capabilities online. These technologies are formulated to enable individuals, planners and corporations to book an event digitally and directly with the venue. This is an important difference from many years ago, as group bookings were usually considered too complex to manage online.

Today’s systems, however, enable groups to perform many of the core functions associated with searching, selecting, and booking event space. Depending upon the technology’s design, it may allow for agenda planning, F&B purchases, AV equipment reservations, and more. These special booking engines may function as part of the venue’s website or originate from several other sources to reduce the cost to the venue operator. They are sometimes combined with additional functionality associated with completing the transaction.

This Capsolve report emphasizes the 30 Group Booking Engines across the restaurant, golf, and hotel industries, with the inclusion of vendors also providing solutions to industries such as stadiums and theaters.  Capsolve identified GBE Solutions designed for these specific industries and classified the category size as Small.  The GBE within group technology is a more recent innovation in the eyes of many businesses across our collective industries. Still, it continues to gain steam, given its ability to let planners and venues create efficiencies during a significant portion of the booking cycle.

The GBE companies in this research are located in selected parts of the world, emphasizing the United States as a headquarters preference, followed by Europe and other English-speaking countries.  Given these pockets of concentration, Capsolve classified this category as having Low geographic dispersion.

Marketplace Context

This category has features that provide a natural baseline for market entry, such as booking parameter entry, lead generation or real-time booking functionality, and support for various types of group purchasing. Additional capabilities create more diversity among vendors when viewing the comprehensive feature set across all their products. This leads us to classify this category with a Low requirements complexity.

All the solutions in this research are designed to create one or more elements of the group booking experience either on one’s website or using a third-party website.  The key characteristics of these solutions include the scope of the ecommerce product covered, the amount of customer data captured, the data flow through vendors, and the breadth of the booking cycle covered by the solution.  The main attribute we held constant was the solutions’ ability to manage at least a portion of a booking transaction for a group. The chosen GBE may control the simplicity or complexity of an implementation. The number of solutions in the marketplace is increasing, although not as rapidly as some other categories.

Current Trends

1. A Rising Tide of Choice: In recent years, we have gone from a handful of relatively fully functional systems to more options.
2. Web Solutions Welcome: Planners can research destinations, venues, event spaces, pricing, and much more online. Not being digitally accessible to this market may put a venue at a disadvantage, depending on sales and marketing strategies.
3. Cohesive Selling Cycle: Creating a smooth marketing, sales, and payment cycle for digital group bookings may still require human interaction to fill gaps.
4. A Sea of Familiarity: The trends associated with the rise of digital group bookings may continue to be similar to those we experienced with the OTA market. Each type of solution gaining traction within the market will meet certain customer demands.

– End of Protected Content –

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, country club industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.