Group Booking Engines

– Start of Protected Content –

Market Summary

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, provide multiple possibilities for venues to provide booking capabilities online. These technologies are formulated to give planners and corporations the option to book the majority of their event digitally and directly with the venue. This is an important difference compared to many years ago, as group bookings were usually considered too complex to manage in an online environment.

Today’s systems, however, enable groups to perform many of the core functions associated with searching, selecting and booking event space. Depending upon a given system’s design, it may also 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 a number of other sources to reduce the cost of the venue operator and are sometimes combined with additional functionality associated with completing the transaction.

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 Group Booking Engines across the restaurant, golf and hotel industries, with 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 is a more recent innovation in the eyes of many businesses across our collective industries, but continues to gain steam given its ability to let both 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, with an emphasis on 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 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.

Access to the sections of this document beyond the Market Summary and to our Interactive Tools is based on your registration level.  Please register for a free or paid account as listed on our Pricing page to gain access to the corresponding content.

– End of Protected Content –

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.