Digitization of meetings & events is becoming increasingly professional - and that's (finally) a good thing!
Hamburg, December 18, 2018 - Hopefully the consolidation will make decisive progress: Expedia's sale of MeetingMarket to the German MICE technology service provider Meetago - an HRS participation - strengthens the German location and the efforts to digitally transform the multi-billion euro meetings and events - Advancing the industry faster. After all, conference providers - hotels and business locations - can finally concentrate on optimizing the complex RFP and booking process, apart from travel sales driven by stock market fantasies. The sale of Expedia is logical and strategically pioneering, since B-to-B offers require their own digital strategy.
The distribution in the conference and event industry (MICE) expands as follows:
- Listings in marketing-strong portals for availability requests - established business model based on SEO / SEM
- Partially digitized RFP processes in hybrid portals - next milestone
- Automated conference venue booking - challenges & competition of powerful booking portals
The next questions immediately arise:
- When can online bookings of conference rooms be combined with hotel rooms? HRS is now challenged here with its participation in Meetago (and thus MeetingMarket).
- How strong are disruptive players like Airbnb for Work? And: What are the chances of two-way interfaces to the strong portal?
- Which (alternative, commission-free) booking tools for conference hotels will accelerate direct bookings of conference rooms?
- Bernd Fritzges, charismatic thought leader in the Meetings & Events business, recently gave a widely recognized key note about the “digital jungle”. A section is available here: https://youtu.be/p2WcmTDaGnA
The entire key note: https://youtu.be/pTLhGu5itN0
https://youtu.be/pTLhGu5itN0