Hospitality Industry News, Hospitality Industry News, Deutsch

Digitization of meetings & events is becoming increasingly professional - and that's (finally) a good thing!

By Rodes Hagen
December 18, 2018

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:




  1. 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).

  2. How strong are disruptive players like Airbnb for Work? And: What are the chances of two-way interfaces to the strong portal?

  3. Which (alternative, commission-free) booking tools for conference hotels will accelerate direct bookings of conference rooms?

  4. 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